GERALD STANLEY 

't:RX)WDS' 




Class X] ^ 
Book > L/ i 
Copyright 1^^ 



/ a 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSnV 



BOOKS 
By GERALD STANLEY LEE 



THE LOST ART OF READING 

A Sketch of Civilization 

THE CHILD AND THE BOOK 

A Constructive Criticism of Education 

THE SHADOW CHRIST 

A Study of the Hebrew Men of Genius 

THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES 

An Introduction to the Twentieth Century 

INSPIRED MILLIONAIRES 

A Study of the Man of Genius in Business 

CROWDS 

A Moving Picture of Democracy 

CROWDS, Jr. 

A Little Introductory Run Through "Grounds" 



WE 



A CONFESSION OF FAITH FOR THE AMERICAN 

PEOPLE DURING AND AFTER WAR. A STUDY 

OF THE ART OF MAKING THINGS, 

HAPPEN. A RECOMMENDATION 

OF THE FIRST PERSON 

PLURAL FOR MEN 

AND NATIONS 



BY 

GERALD STANLEY LEE 



The Author of " Crowds ' 




Garden City New York 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1916 



li 6 i i 
.[i4 



Copyright, 1916, hy 
DOUBLEDAY, PaGE & CoMPANY 

All rights reserved, including that of 

translation into foreign languages, 

including the Scandinavian 




^ APR -7 1916 



©C(.A4284ag 

/ 



Contents 

ACT I 

PAGE 

FOREWORD xi 

LOOK I— ELEVEN DUMB NATIONS 3 

LOOK II— A CONFESSION OF FAITH 8 

I — Humdrum War 8 

n — Humdrum Peace 15 

ni — Peace 18 

LOOK III— THE AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT AND 

WAR . . . . • 21 

I — Has America a Character of Her Own? .... ^21 
n — Is America Afraid to Express Her Character in Her 

Own Way.'^ 25 

LOOK IV— MR. CARNEGIE AND HIS PEACE-FLOCK 3i 

I — Does Mr. Carnegie Express America.'* 3 "2 

n — Everybody Speaks Up 41 

m — Telescopes and Benches 46 

IV — Mr. Carnegie and the People 50 

V — The Hague Palace and You and Me 54 

VI — Taking the War Personally 56 

VII— Taking the War Nationally 59 

Vin — War and Human Nature 64 

IX — Machinery and War and Human Nature ... 69 

X— Lyddite 76 

XI— The Art of Making People Look 79 

Xn— The Art of Making Nations Look 84 

XIII— The Art of Advertising Peace ....... 87 

XIV— The Best Way to Get the World's Attention to Peace 89 

iii 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

XV— Mr. Ford and His Factories . . o . . . . 95 

XVI— Mr. Carnegie and His Monuments 12i2 

XVn— Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Carnegie . . . . . . 127 

XMH- Mr. Carnegie and Other People 131 

XIX— Mr. Carnegie and Me 135 

LOOK V— MR. ROCKEFELLER AND HIS RELIEF WORK 141 

LOOK VI— SEVEN THOUSAND ARMOURED MILLION- 
AIRES 144, 

I — How to Know an Armoured Millionaire When One 

Sees One 1^4 

n — How an Armoured Millionaire Can Know Himself 148 

in — The Hardships of Doing Good loO 

IV — The Hardships of Being Done Good to or at . .153 

V — Foundations and Young Men 159 

VT — On Butting in After One Is Dead 165 

Vn — On Being a Father Forever 167 

Vin — Mr. Rockefeller, the People and National Defense 171 

IX— Mr. Rockefeller and This Book 173 



ACT II 



• LOOK I— THE ART OF MAKING THINGS HAPPEN 

I— Why They Don't 

n— How They Might ...... 

in — Confessions of a Merely Literary Man 
IV — Advertising a Civilization as a Religion 
V— The Autobiography of an "Ad" . . 
VI — What Reading Advertisements Is Like 
vn — Consequences of Reading Advertisements 

Vlll — More Consequences 

IX— Mount Tom Is Converted .... 
X— Mount Tom Junction Braces Up . 
XI— The Spirit of Making Things Happen 
Xn— News to People About Their Own Pocketbooki 
Xm— News to People About Their Own Business 



177 
177 
179 
182 
188 
191 
193 
197 
20^-2 
205 
210 
214 
218 
221 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



, 287 



XIV— News to People About Themselves ..... 226 
XV-Why an Advertising Man (When No One Is Looking) 

Prays 2^,-, 

XVI— Why He Sings ^^^ 

XVII— Why He Works • 

LOOK II-ADVERTISING A NATION ...... 253 

I_With Guns and Billboards T't 

II_With Faces and Books -f 

III— With Hyenas ,^^^^ 

IY_\Yith Fellow Human Beings " o'^- 
V-How Can a Nation Get What It Wants.? . . 2.0 

VI-How Can a Nation Be Naive with a World? . . 2/8 
VII-Two Americas and One Mr. Roosevelt .... ^8U 

VIII— Jack Johnson and Mr. Roosevelt ...... ^^^^ 

IX — Hip-pocket Peace . • 
X— Everybody Step This Way 
XI— The Planet Lockup . • 

Xn— Frightfulness and Thoughtfulness -^ 

Xin-The Elements of a Good National Advertisement ot ^^^ 

America „ 

XIV— The Uses of Famous Men' 

• XV— 57 Varieties— But Especially Four ^ - 

XVI— Mr. Wilson, Mr. Roosevelt, and Gideon . . . . ^^u 
XVII— Advertisements by Mr. Wilson 

Advertisements by Mr. Roosevelt ^^^ 

XVIII— May 15, 1915 ^^.^ 

XIX— Humour in Advertising a Nation - 

XX— Perspective in Advertising a Nation ^^^ 

XXI— Mr. Roosevelt's Frankness 

XXII-Cowards and Liars and National Defense ' ' ' ^^^ 

XXIII— The Rights of a Saphead • • • 

XXIV— The Last Murmur of a Mollycoddle ^^^ 

XXV— War-Mooning ^^^ 

XXVI— More War-Mooning ' ' 370 

XXVII— Peace-Dreaming ^^^ 

XXVIII— Advertising . • ^^g 

XXIX— Advertising Advertising 

v 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

LOOK III-DRAMATIZING BUSINESS 381 

I— John Brown Smith Tries ^^1 

n— Jolm Brown Smith's Play ^^'^ 

in— The Nation's Play ^^^ 

TY_The Caste of the Nation's Play 39>2 

V — One Scene ^ ' 

VI— Sorting Ont the Caste ••■••••• ^^^ 

^rn— Another Scene (The Salesmen's Scene) .... -10.^ 

^T[I— Whiners and Getters 4^" 

IX— Putting the National Play to a Vote . . . 411 
X— The Vote for the I-s 

The Vote for the We-s 416 

XI— The We-s Have It 420 

LOOK IV— THE SCIENCE OF BEING BELIEVED . 422 
I_The Confessions of a Ten-Thousand-Dollar Bill 

The Reveries of a Railroad 422 

11— The New Woman's Way of Staging a Business . 4''>2 
in— The New Employer's Way 

The New Salesman's Way 438 

IV— The New Nation's Way 446 

LOOK V— AMERICA AND THE WORLD 44!) 

I— Ends 449 

n— Means 451 

LOOK VI— AMERICA, GERMANY AND THE WORLD . 4:.S 

I — Germany and America 4.')8 

n — America and Germany 461 

ni— What Makes a Nation Think 464 

IV— What Makes a Nation Work 470 

V — Revolution and Authority 474 

\1 — Revolution and Listening 479 

MI— The Over Meek 481 

Vm— The Under Meek 486 

IX — The Over Male 488 

X — What Might Be Asked of America 492 

XI— What Might Be Asked of Germany 495 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

XII — The Art of International Confession 499 

XIII— The End of a Million Baby War 502 

XIV — A Little Doorway of Peace 507 

ACT III 

FOREGROUNDS AND BACKGROUNDS OF AMERICAN 

BELIEF 

LOOK I— YOU AND I STREET 511 

I — The Feeling of Being a Dog 511 

II — The Feeling of Being a Foreigner 513 

III — The Habit of Agreeing with One's Enemies . . 516 

IV — Thinking in the Dark 519 

V — Thinking in Three Dimensions 520 

LOOK II— THE LAND OF THEY AND IT 527 

I — The Idea That a Government Must Not Be Personal 527 

II — The Idea That a Government Cannot Make a Mistake 533 
III — The Idea That the Way for a Government to Correct 

One Mistake Is to Make Another 540 

IV— The Idea That a Government Must Not Think . 542 
V— The Idea That a Nation Must Not Be Allowed to Be 

Human 547 

VI — The Idea That a Nation Cannot Laugh .... 550 
VII — The Idea That a Nation as a Matter of Principle Must 

Expect to Be Morally Second-Rate .... 552 

VIII— Chips 554 

LOOK III— THE WE COUNTRY 555 

I — Taking the War to Ourselves 555 

II — We Workmen and National Defense 560 

III — We Salesmen and National Defense 566 

IV— Ninety Million Faces 568 

LOOK IV— WHAT BEING A NEUTRAL IS LIKE ... 570 

I — What Being a Neutral Is Like 570 

II — What Being a Neutral Is Like Nationally . . . 573 

III — What Being a Neutral Is Like Personally . . . 576 

IV— The Right to Be Neutral 580 

vii 



CONTENTS 

PAG^ 

V_Neutrality Plus ' fo- 

VI— False Honour 58^ 

Vn— False Simplicity , ^^^ 

LOOK V— WHAT BEING A NEUTRAL IS NOT LIKE 596 

I— Mr. Shaw Shaws ^^^ 

n— Mr. Miinsterberg Takes a Walk ...... 606 

m— Professor Walz Calls a Meeting ...... 611 

ACT IV 
ELEVEN NATIONS ASK US 

I— The War Loneliness 61o 

II— The War and I 614 

III— Reveries on the Back Step of a Trolley .... 622 

IV— Crowds Compare Notes 627 

V — Eleven Nations Ask Us 635 

ACT V 

THE PRESIDENT, THE PEOPLE, AND THIS BOOK, 
ALSO THE COLONEL 



LOOK I— THE PRESIDENT, THE PEOPLE, AND THIS 
BOOK „ . 

I — The President and the Parlour Car . 

n— This Book 

m— Overalls 

IV— The Nation's Way of Picking People Out 

LOOK II— THE COURAGE TO UNDERSTAND 

LOOK m— THE WILL TO BE UNDERSTOOD 
I— The Real Colonel Roosevelt .... 
n — The Colonel and the Worm .... 
ni— The Colonel, the Chinaman, and the Women's Clubs 
IV — The Colonel and the Business Men . . 



641 
641 
64,5 
647 
651 

653 

65.5 
655 
658 
663 
66J 



vui 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

V— On Getting the Colonel Not to Be Afraid ... 671 
VI — The Colonel's Way and Mr. Rockefeller's Way of Not 

Being Afraid 673 

LOOK IV— FEAR-SURGERY 677 

LOOK V— A FEW OPERATIONS . ..o ... 679 

I— The Belgium Fear and Others 679 

II— Still Others 685 



EPILOGUE 
SUPER-PREPAEEDNESS 

1.— The Right to More Than One Nation .... 693 

2. — Super-Preparedness 696 

3. — America Stands by 698 

4. — Eleven Nations Say You and I 701 

5.— The Death of Murder . 704 

6.— We 707 



IX 



"TO THE 

OVERTONE— THE UNDERTONE— 

TO THE LIGHT AND SHADOW 

BEHIND THE WORDS, 

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK" 



FOREWORD 

The first thing the war has done to most of us is to undermine 
our daily assumptions about one another — about human nature 
and ourselves. For years, ever since we were children, apples 
have fallen to the ground from trees. Everything about us has 
had a humble but reliable way of holding down hard to the 
ground itself, and now suddenly our whole world has changed. 
It's as if everything had turned around — as if everything the 
moment we touched it or struck it, at once started to the sky. 
Our moral force of gravity has been upset. We go around, 
some of us, holding things down and holding one another down. 
At least this is the way we feel. If anything is to be kept where 
it is or as we have known it in this world, we have got to take 
hold of it personally with both hands and with all our might and 
hold it there. 

Here are all our assumptions about foreigners, for instance. 
We do not really feel we are different from the Germans and the 
English, and yet there they all are over there living in what 
looks like a kind of regulated craziness. All this must be latent 
in us, we say to ourselves. We are crazy, too. I am. You 
are. John Doe is. Americans by being luckily tucked away in 
time on a perfectly fresh continent a little one side may have 
managed to keep up appearances, but that is all. We may 
break out any minute. It's as if all the people about us were 
mined. 

No man can really be quite what we think he is of course, 

xi 



xii FOREWORD 

Some days, after some special incredible bit of news about what 
people do, we go about up and down the streets, underneath in 
our hearts calling each other names, and looking each other in 
the eyes. "You are like this, too! You are really crazy, you 
know — if you had the chance. . . . Human nature is a 
disease." 

The man I sat next to at the play last night, when I spoke of 
the morning paper, said he had not seen one. He had to keep in 
trim for business — had to put up a stiff game with human nature 
all day. He had to give up reading about the war, he said. 

Watching one sick man that one cannot help for an hour be- 
fore going to business every morning is bad enough. Watching 
a whole sick continent, and nothing one can do, takes it out of 
one. 

The head clerk in Johnson's Bookshop, in Springfield, yester- 
day told me everybody came in and bought war books at first. 
The average man started in apparently buying every war book 
he could get. But it is not so now. The average American 
sees these great companies of books that are already, like cavalry, 
galloping out upon him. He does the only thing he can. He 
drops the whole subject of the war, runs into his office and 
screws himself to his desk. 



Why is it that it unmans a man to read the papers about 
the war? Why is it that people have already stopped reading 
war books almost before a tenth of them have come out? 

I believe it is because the war books are discouraged about 
human nature— because they putter and dab away at the sub- 
ject—diplomatize, historicalize, theorize, morahze, ostracize, 



FORE^^ORD xiii 

sort out blame and hurl around vengeance, and do not believe 
in human nature any more than we do. 

And here we are every day and every night before we go to 
bed and every morning when we rise — every man of us, facing 
a great crisis in human nature. 

Most war books do not recognize this personal struggle we 
are each of us having, at all. They swing around it grandly and 
talk about submarines, lyddite, petroleum, .and copper and 
statistics, different kinds of murder, ups and downs of battle, 
and the ins and outs of international law, diplomacy, and food 
supply. 

And all the while the fight that is really on is the fight each 
man of us is having by himself, with the weight and the blackness 
of his own heart. The real war — the universal war — is this 
one — the war of the spectators, the unspeakable mortality, 
suicide and slaughter of the spectators — galleries of nations 
reaching away. . . , It is only a few million men who are 
in the war in Europe. The rest of us cover the earth. Why is 
there not a war book for us? It looks as if might made right. 
It looks as if human nature was so constructed that this is 
true. If this is true we do not want to work or eat or struggle or 
live. Every day when I read a paper I am fighting this out. 
Every day when I read a war book, I find the war book skipping 
this fight. And yet this is the great war. This is every man's 
war. At least I know it is my war. And why does every war 
book, one after the other, skip Me? 

If there has ever been a time in the history of the world when 
millions of people wanted a war book that would cheer them up 
about human nature, it is now. 

I want one, and have not found it yet. So have had to try 



XIV 



FOREWORD 



to bungle along as well as I could— write one for my own use 
from day to day, as a personal convenience for living. I know 
that this war is and must be a part of a larger vision. I know 
that if we can look hard, take our stand back far enough in 
civilization to get our perspective, see the whole picture the war 
is a part of, the war will cheer us up. 

The thing that is going to count most in settling the present 
war is the theory of human nature each man in this world lives 
with while he watches it. Only a small proportion of us can 
help on the field of battle, but every man can fight every day just 
where he is and while he works, on the really big masterpiece 
the world is working out just now day by day for the next 
thousand years — the world's working theory of human nature. 

It is the personal affair of all of us. 

I deal with the theory of human nature we are all consciously 
or unconsciously fighting for, and with which I believe we are 
going to meet the crisis, in the following, pages. 



ACT T 

Eleven Dumb Nations 

A Confession of Faith 

The American Temperament and War 

Mr. Carnegie and His Peace-flock 

Mr. Rockefeller and His Relief Work 

Seven Thousand Armoured Millionaires 



LOOK I 

ELEVEN DUMB NATIONS 

THE first thing I have noticed about most people's theor- 
ies about the war is the extraordinary idea they have of 
how intelhgent everybody is and of what deep, beauti- 
ful, or base or noble, shrewd, glaringly wicked, astonishingly 
significant thoughts and motives, all the people have who have 
started it. Everybody assumes that everybody who has had 
anything to do in starting the war is very deep and very thought- 
ful and significant; that everything that has been done is full of 
meaning. 

It does not seem to me it is like this at all. The main fact 
about this war is that the world has become in the last forty 
years a world of machines. The war has been brought on 
because suddenly in this world at last we have a lot of machines 
that mean a great deal heaped up around us — and people in 
charge of the machines who do not mean anything. 

Reading ideas and motives into the people is idle. 

They have none. They are under their machines. The 
machines are miraculous, monstrous and godlike. The men in 
charge of them, like the men under the Wireless, like the men 
under the Zeppelins and the men under the Krupps, are just 
little ants running round. 

This is what has happened. 

It is a mistake to suppose that because people do things in 
a machine civilization they mean anything by them. The rea- 
son all the people are fighting in Europe to-day is that the diplo- 
mats — the men whose special business it is to express nations to 
one another — could not catch up in expressing them to their 



4 WE 

machines. Machines have got ahead of words, The war in 
Europe is a stupendous breakdown of the European languages. 
Our machinery for fighting, for making our bodies plain to each 
other, our vast engines of mutual destruction, had been perfected, 
and our machinery for talking, for making our souls plain to 
one another, our vast engines of mutual understanding, had 
hardly begun to be set up. We have been getting ready for 
forty years and are fighting by machinery. Our talking or 
understanding is unorganized, is still being done by hand. 
And of course we are very far behind in it. Every nation in 
Europe to-day is practically a dumb nation. Each has suddenly 
failed to find words to express itself, to express its temperament 
to the other temperaments so that it will be understood. So 
they fight. 

Why did the nations suddenly and completely fail to express 
themselves to one another.^ 

A crisis arose in which they had to express themselves with 
immense effect in a few hours, or it would be too late. 

Any great nation— say of fifty million people — that is so 
placed or so places itself that it has got to express fifty million 
people in a few hours or die, finds out in a hurry that the facilities 
in this present world for expressing fifty million people to three 
hundred million other people, and getting all the expression in 
before twelve o'clock that night, are very inadequate. 

Naturally if a nation of fifty million people has got to express 
itself while the clock goes around once it must find some way of 
doing it all in one swoop— in the same way that machinery does 
things. 

Everything in modern life done for very large numbers of 
people in a very short time has to be done by machinery. The 
only big machine any nation in Europe had provided itself with 
for the emergency of expressing itself all at once, all in one huge 
crash m a day, was the army machine. 

As every nation in Europe had on hand a machine of this 
kmd for the purpose of makino itself impressive in a day, and 



ELEVEN DUMB NATIONS 5 

did not possess any other machine that could do it, all they could 
do was to use the only means they had ready. 

So it came to pass that the people of eleven nations — because 
they were told they had only a day in which to express them- 
selves, gave up and let their soldiers do it. Eleven or twelve 
very much scared men, experts in being scared, drilled all their 
lives in being scared on time, who could not hold their fear under 
any longer — each of these men told his nation it would have to.' 
express itself in a day or die. \ 

Everybody had to take their word for it. There wasn't any-\ 
body out of all the three hundred million men concerned who 
could really manage to talk back to specialists, to authorities, to 
experts in being scared on time, like soldiers. Once grant that 
there really was a hurry — that, if a nation took a week in which 
to think, it would die — and everything follows. 

The one really determining question in this war is whether 
or not this personal interpretation of a situation by a few threat- 
ening-minded persons was necessary. 

It is not, at bottom, a war they are having in Europe. It 
is a hurry. 

The war is the mere, helpless, dumb way that each nation has 
taken with the other nations of expressing the hurry. 

On the last day of Jidy one goes to sleep thinking of all the 
people over there as in their right minds, expressing themselves 
in living their lives. The next morning one looks up and sees 
one's Europe suddenly upside down. If all the men in Europe 
had by common consent that first August morning stopped 
walking around on the ground and begun walking upside down 
like flies, on the ceiling of the sky, as if it were the most natural 
thing in the world, we could not have been more surprised. 

What had happened was that the world and all the people in 
it with one single motion had been switched off on to the military 
circuit. 

But the people in Europe are at heart the same people they were 
eighteen months ago. All that is the matter with them is that 



g WE 

they have been caught in a hurry. Three hundred million men 
down in the holds of eleven nations where they could not see for 
themselves what was going on above them and ahead of them 
have been suddenly shouted to by a few men on deck to come 
up and die. They came up sincerely and are dying in good 
faith. 

We would do the same ourselves. 

But they would not have done it if they had not been down in 
dark holds and taken unawares, under the necessity of acting 
before they had time to think for themselves. 

So at last we are having, as on some huge world movie-screen 
where ninety nations watch. History's last look at what war 
really is. 

It is the essential nature of militarism that people shall be 
kept in holds where they cannot see and that they shall be ready 
to die when the order is shouted down to them. 

This is why an army as a machine for expressing fifty million 
men in a minute would be funny if one could keep from cursing 
long enough to be amused by it. 

The men may think they are expressing themselves. They are 
killing each other at the rate of several thousand a day with the 
idea that they are expressing themselves and their nations. But 
the stupendous fact is that they are really expressing the last 
dogged, hopeless, helpless, dumb faithfulness of men down in the 
hold of the world toward men in uniforms strutting around on 
the bridge and shouting down through speaking tubes to the 
fathers and sons and brothers of eleven nations: "shut your 

-MOUTHS AND DIE ! " 

The war is the failure of our machines for expressing our real 
selves. In each nation the machine it had paid the most atten- 
tion to was its army— its machine for expressing itself when it 
was scared. The machines for expressing the courage of the 
people toward other peoples, the machines for expressing love 
and expectation, common service and common faith in human 
nature, were not ready. These latter machines, while they are 



ELEVEN DUMB NATIONS 7 

infinitely more powerful and effective, had not been finished off 
for quick work. Without warning, a few military-minded men, 
so scared they had to fight, fooling with nervous fingers on the 
trigger of the world, touch it — and the world goes off. 

All the vast machines of hate go off. 

But it is not because men are beasts, but because our machines 
for being beasts work better on a sudden call than our machines 
for being men. Anybody interested in these machines should 
watch them now. It may be his last chance. 



LOOK II 

A CONFESSION OF FAITH 

I 

HUMDRUM WAR 

ONE of the most disturbing and mixed-up things that has 
happened to me in learning how to hve through a world 
war is the way my mind has carried on with regard to 
peace. Instead of wanting to fight less while all this fighting 
has been going on, I have never felt so much like fighting, so full 
of the emotion, the spirit, the urge of the fighter, in my life. 

I have devoted in my time reams of hopeful white paper to 
writing about the spirit of partnership and about mutual inter- 
t'sts and about the cause of peace. But there is not a minute 
since this war broke out that I don't want to go out and help 
whip somebody. 

I have been wondering why this is. 

I must eally have been like this all the time. And now the 
war is bringmg me out. 

And yet I would have said two years ago that if ever my 
mouth would be full of sweet words and if ever my heart would 
run over with gentleness it would be now. * 

I watch from across the sea those millions of men who stand 
side by side to fight on the battlefields of Europe, and while I 
may talk about peace by the hour, I do not and cannot feel 
superior to them or unidentified with them, or unidentified with 
the fundamental emotion with which they are doing what they 
do. I should be called, I suppose, a sort of peace person by 

8 



HUMDRUM WAR 9 

them. They wouldn't really approve of me. But I approve — 
down underneath — of them. It may seem at first sight a sadly 
mixed -up thing to do. But I am doing it. I do it every morn- 
ing when I take up my paper. My heart goes out to them. 

At last I have faced myself out. I have come to my confession 
of faith. The men in this world who are fighting are the men I 
want to be with and that I want to be like. In a vague, anony- 
mous, and therefore irresponsible sneaking civilization like this, 
I do not propose (for one) to put in a minute except when I'm 
asleep, in not fighting. 

Most of the peace talk I hear humdrumming aroimd bores me. 
It seems to me abstract, cold, twiddling, and scared about real 
human nature. The imprecatory psalms would do most of the 
people who are talking about peace to-day a world of good. x\s 
a state of spiritual liveliness, as a good, sound substratum- 
emotion for keeping up some gusto in modern life and making 
peace mean something, they could not be much improved upon . 

If the peace people would begin to put into their talk about 
peace the same spiritual tenacity, the same grit and whole- 
heartedness that David did into the imprecatory psalms, if the 
peace people had one tenth as much faith as David had, if they 
believed in what peace would do with an enemy as hard as David 
believed in what a licking would do with him, peace people 
would interest me. As it is they do not begin to express — at 
least they have not as yet — my feeling about peace. I have 
tried faithfully for years to get interested in them. I have tried 
to be hopeful and I have failed. The people who have got hold 
of peace and who are running it as if it were some little thing of 
their own to-day are the wrong people. They are brackish, 
lukewarm, gray-minded, neuter-minded people. They are not 
going to make peace amount to anything as a man's force in a 
man's world until they catch up in what they say about peace, 
to the swing and the tone and the drive of the imprecatory 
psalms. 

I do not quite know how to say it, but I think that all these 



10 WE 

dear worthy people who go up and down the world whining 
gently about peace before the iron gates of the nations, cannot 
really have thought about peace very much. I have come to 
feel (with a war to drive it in) that they cannot have thought it 
out and they ought not to try to represent it. Anybody can see 
it. They make everybody misunderstand peace. They have 
all along. They do not understand it themselves. If they did 
they would believe in it. People who present a sublime, irre- 
sistible, implacable burning energy like peace as if it were a duty 
or as if it were a mere virtue do not believe in peace. 

I do not wish to be mixed up indiscriminately in what I have 
to say about peace, with these people. I know I ought to feel 
ashamed of feeling superior in this way. I know that feeling 
superior is always superficial. I know I am going to be ashamed 
very soon of what I am saying about them, but I cannot help just 
at this fierce crisis we are in to-day putting down my feeling 
about peace people as it is. 

I would not be seen with them. I have lost all patience with 
them and with their pretty little toy playhouse Mr. Carnegie 
has set up for them, where they run and play with their minds, 
and pile up blocks with their minds. It seems to me it is a 
spiritless, theoretical, and morally underbred thing to do, to 
present peace to people as a thing they ought to have. It takes 
back what peace is, to present it as a duty or as a virtue. 

But probably I do not understand peace people. 

I am a fighter. 

I present peace as a better way of fighting. I present peace 
as fighting to a finish. I am proud to be a fighter. I fight 
against carbonic acid gas. I fight against the air, the sky, the 
sea, darkness, clouds, the entrails of the earth, and against 
cold, heat, microbes, typhoid fever, malaria — against Time — 
Space— and against lies in the hearts of people. I fight against 
lies in people, not against the people, but the lies that have 
seized them. There are but two understandings I have come to 
h?ve with myself about fighting. They represent my only 



HUMDRUM WAR 11 

difference with fighters as I know them. First, I will not fight 
people. I will fight for people. I will fight the fever and lies in 
the people. Second, I will not take sides. I fight for all people. 
I fight all the lies in all the people. 

I present peace as a sublime, difficult, hazardous, beautiful 
glowing-up of every man's common sense. 

I present peace as a radium for getting for ourselves and for 
others what we all really want. I present peace as, the consum- 
mate self-assertion of all of us — as every man's assertion of his 
larger self. 

I believe that to put Peace over on the one hand and say, 
*'this is what you ought to have," and War over on the other and 
say, "this is what you ought not to have," is a tragic under- 
statement, a monstrous lie. I propose to chase or help chase 
this lie out of the big nations into the little ones, and out of 
the little ones into the sea. Fish can believe it — that peace 
is a mere virtue — if they want to. I will not, and no nation that 
believes it very long will amount to enough in this present era 
of scientific, of realistic and honest thought, to make very much 
difference. 

We are not merely going to theorize about it. It is a funda- 
mental instinct, a temperament, a faith in our blood and our 
bones. It is the very essence of what modern American men 
are really like, of the practical way we live, to act and to feel 
about war in this way. We may have to live on a scared, irrita- 
ble, mean little planet, one where the nations to all appearances 
at least have not the nerve to stop believing in war, but we do 
not propose. to back down from our daily instincts, our actual 
feelings about war, to back down and fight against our wills 
because other nations have backed down and are fighting against 
their wills. Here is what I believe might be put down provision- 
ally as America's Confession of Faith During War. 

War, regular humdrum war, is a low-spirited, scared institu- 
tion. 

Hard fighters hate it. 



12 ^^'E 

A soldier or gun-thinker is a man who has no courage about 
himself— his ability to make people see things, and no courage 
about others— their ability to come to see them. So he backs 
down and fights. 

There was a captain of a schooner once who put a little engine 
in it and one day in a dead calm ten miles out to sea the engine 
wouldn't go. He puttered and swore a while and then all 
suddenly — nobody looking — there came a great noise, and every- 
body turned and looked, and there he was, poor fellow, thrashing 
that engine with a crowbar. 

He lost his courage. 

Nations do this. They stop thinking they can think. They 
stop believing they know enough and are clever enough to make 
other nations think. 

War is a nation's discouraged way of expressing itself. War 
is a nation's confession that its literature has failed, that its 
editors cannot write, that its funny papers are outwitted, that 
its artists cannot draw, that its banks cannot lend money, that 
its canning factories, engineers, bridge-builders, and inventors 
are not formidable, that its statesmen cannot think, its diplomats 
cannot talk, that its religious leaders or experts in seeing through 
people, its spiritual engineers in excavating common ground 
for people, its inventors of brains for nations, have turned their 
backs and run. 

In this country for instance, for many years, as a result of the 
Civil War, the South has despised the North and has wanted 
nothing to do with Northerners. All that we had been able to 
get the South to know about us by the war was that we could 
fight. Then we tried preaching to them, and passing laws for 
them, and sending down troops to keep them in order and to 
make their temperaments more like our temperaments. We 
liothered them with all kinds of fooHsh distant moraUzing recon- 
struction. Finally after all the political missionaries and all the 
lawyers and all the wise editors a thousand miles away got 
discouraged about the South, or about getting on with the South, 



HUMDRUM WAR 13 

a few business men from the North went down to Birmingham, 
Alabama, shut their mouths and lent it some money. A few 
Northerners and Southerners got together and did things to- 
gether. They found out what everybody was like, how many 
qualities and how many things each wanted that the other had, 
and then the North and the South set together in Birmingham, 
Alabama, to make a great nation out of two foolish half ones, 
and have been at it ever since. 

The best way to touch the imagination of the South to North- 
ern character and a united country and to what Northern and 
Southern character could do together, was Birmingham, Ala- 
bama, and Booker Washington was the best way for the South 
to touch the imagination of the North with its race problem. 

We keep peace with Japan because our electric lights, motors, 
railroads, banks. Bibles, markets, schools, steam-hammers, faiths 
and dredges have touched Japan's imagination. Our war prob- 
lem is how to make our Bibles mean more and make our dredges 
better — work our Bibles into our dredges. The first nation that 
supplies itself with competent capital — capital that can make 
labour want to work, and competent labour and labour that can 
make capital want to pay — will get a third more done in a day 
(with the same strength) than any other nation can do. Nobody 
on earth can afford to interrupt it. Screws and buttons, pota- 
toes and milk shall make Japan and Russia afraid. 

This is our American temperament, our national ideal of ex- 
pressing ourselves. If we must do a small, low-spirited merely 
patriotic thing like defending ourselves, here is our idea of a 
powerful modern national armament, of the way to fight. 

To fight people, see a third quicker what they want than they 
can. Don't cannonade them. Get inside them. Be their 
breath, be bread and butter to them, radium, eyes, and feet; 
vail, wilson and taylor and debs them; x-ray and burbank them. 
Stay at home against them with twenty million men who put 
ten days in a week. 

Not a thing men use that shall not be busy everywhere every 



14 WE 

day making nations afraid of us. Motor cars and harvesting 
machines shall go wheeling about, shall swing the fear of America 
— a peaceful, glorious and happy fear — through all the earth. 
We shall conquer our enemies in their own dooryards by their 
own firesides, by serving them better than they can serve them- 
selves. 



n 

HUMDRUM PEACE 

I do not deny that to be peaceful is to be good, but I rebel 
against the way it is presented as good, as if the goodness were 
in us. It is merely ordinarily bright and clever to defer to a 
grim natural force like peace. Why should we put on moral airs 
-ibout it and think it is good in us? The reason that the peace 
campaign has failed is that it has been honeycombed with this 
Idea of peace, and of presenting peace. 

It seems to me that this must be stopped. Probably I am 
a little unreasonable in dwelling on it as I do in this chapter. 
But if there is one thing I cannot bear it is to have people feel 
that they are accommodating the Creator by being good. And 
they do — most of them. They think how nice it is of them, and 
how nice it is for Him, that they at last, for a little while, are 
being good ! 

Peace is either an energy, a radiant energy, and gives off 
volts, or it is nothing. A peaceful man is a man to be afraid of. 
He fills men according to their actions with terror or delight. 

Peace is a kind of genius. Everybody (thousands of small 
boys have seen it) has seen what peace is. Every playground 
has one boy on it who gets everything he wants out of other boys 
and for other boys and for himself by a mysterious something 
inside him, by the radium emanations of his mind. He can 
be watched any day lending his soul, sorting out his imagination 
to other boys and being deferred to for it, and being made their 
leader for it. 

This thing the boy has that the other bullying boys have not, 
is peace. 

15 



16 ^"^E 

Peace is a spirit in a man, a surrounding and comprehending 

light. 

People who present it as a duty or as a moral ornament or 
luxury do not know what peace is. It is a crushing energy, a 
stark necessity, a grim, fearful, beautiful, irresistible moral depth 
or force of gravity. All power flows into it, flows into peace 
like water into a trough at the bottom of a hill. 

Peace is the bottom below the bottom of every subject, of 
every idea, the beyond behind the beyond, and the top above the 
top in every crisis. Peace swings masters and overs weeps and 
outreaches as a matter of course everybody who has not got it. 
It puts men out of date and out of sight who have not got it. 
It is childish to try to resist a man whose soul has been fitted 
up with peace. He sees what is coming with a telescope when 
the little furious hater by him is staring at it with his naked 
eye. We stand naked and lonely before him while his search- 
lights, telescopes, theodolites, submarines, aeroplanes and wire- 
less play about us. We are helpless in his hands. He laughs 
at our fury. 

The feet of the man of peace are shod with terror and with 
love and there is no withstanding him. 

And now the peace people have built a palace at The Hague, 
a kind of international headquarters or prayer-meeting for 
apologizing for peace, a place for mooning weakly and wonder- 
ing if peace cannot be made to work, a great fortress of pale 
resolutions, of rows of Prince Albert coats. I see it always as 
a kind of Rescue Mission or Hope Mission for Peace, a little 
tinkly chapel, with a little tinkly bell, a little jingle of money 
—to call the great swarthy nations together— to ask them to 
come in please, to stoop down please and be teased to notice 
Peace ! 

Burglar-protection in banks and in the streets used to con- 
sist of clubs and revolvers. It is all managed now by turning 
on the light. If the reader wants to know what this book is 
about all in one line, this book is about turning on the light. 



HUMDRUM PEACE 17 

America cannot put herself where she will have to moralize 
to the older nations about peace. It is as bad for a nation, a 
hundred million men, to moralize and to tell other people to be 
good, as it is for a single man to do it, as it would be for me to 
do it. I have tried doing it. Other men have. I have given 
it up lately. It does not work. It is superficial. If anybody 
catches me once for a single page in this book whining peace at 
him, spraying moral observations like a kind of cologne at him, 
he can return this book to the author or the publisher and get 
his money back. 

I would probably admit when driven to it that peace is a 
virtue. 

But if I cannot present to a man, having a virtue like peace 
as like having a new automobile, as having something that is 
going to carry him around, if I am caught presenting it to him 
as something he has got to carry, or that he has got to be the 
engine of himself — I do not know what virtue is. I have got 
it all turned around. I believe that America in its present 
crisis and time to act is not going to turn peace around. Every 
single one of the glorious things that have been sung about 
fighting on the sea and in the field we will claim for peace in 
America and for men of peace, for millions of men in this world 
who fight with light, with heat, with real forces, who would be 
bored to be in the armies and navies of the world. 

This is the only way America will speak of peace. 

We will catch up into peace and claim for peace the swing of 
armies, the march and beat of singing soldiers. We will offer 
to all men the poetry, the vividness, danger, glory, the courage, 
the sublime adventure of peace ! 



Ill 

PEACE 

I would not seem to say but that peace people— all these 
worthy but faded-out and smoothed-away human beings who 
have drubbed away on peace all these years and philosophizzled 
on it and made weak anxious twitches at the nations — have 
their value for us. They constitute a fine clear-cut definition 
to us and to the nations once for all of what people who 
are really peaceful are not like. Peace does not consist in 
begging everybody to give up and be good. It is a devour- 
ing passion — all powerful men to-day have it — of self-fulfil- 
ment, of self-overflowing. Peace is a gusto of mutual self- 
expression. 

Unless the peace in us strikes out and grips happiness for 
others as a part of getting ours, it may set well on us and it may 
be something very pretty and something very becoming to us and 
it may do for editorials, or for conventions, or for committees, 
but it is not peace. 

Unless all the nations are racing along half out of breath 
to get it and get more of it, unless peace is a thing to be grabbed 
by people, to be possessed and sat on by a nation like a 
billion-dollar chest, unless it is to be fought for as a national 
possession or as an international possession like the Panama 
Canal or like a World's Treasure Island, it is not peace. Peace 
is the international passport of each nation to success and to 
national greatness, or it is nothing. 

Peace is the simplest, most rudimentary necessary conveni- 
ence this planet has got to be furnished with before it can fairly 
be called (for human beings anyway) a planet at all. 

18 



PEACE 10 

As a planet for hyenas, hyenas with guns, it is quite com- 
plete. But how about us? The next thing we want to do, it 
seems to me, is to assert ourselves on it, to hammer it as beaten 
brass into a planet for us, or at least smooth off a place on it 
where we can be human and be our real selves. 

On the whole probably it is going to be best to stop talking 
about Peace as "beautiful." It would be more to the point 
to say, Peace is terrible. It is as a burning heat, as a wild 
endless waste of desert at noon-day. And all who defy it are 
withered. Sometimes they are withered in five minutes and 
sometimes in five hours, sometimes in five years or five centuries; 
but all who defy it and all the works of those who defy it are 
withered. 

It is obvious that peace is beautiful, but just at the present 
crisis of the world and with the present people with whom we 
have to deal, I would make a mistake to picture peace (as I 
would rather) as a garden. If I were to picture peace as a 
garden, many important people would promptly set it one side 
as beautiful. They would begin to patronize it and condescend 
to it as they always do to the beautiful. 

I do not see why people are so apt to dismiss a thing when it 
is beautiful. I should think they would not dare. To me the 
beautiful is terrible. I am afraid of it. I dare not fail to defer 
to it. 

Probably it would not be agreeable to many people to con- 
ceive of a garden as terrible. But to me when I stand in it 
in the dewy morning, when I watch the flowers in it lifting them- 
selves up out of deep night, a garden is terrible; it is as the roar 
of subdued cannon in the sun ! A rose is filled with a force that 
would rock mountains. And so do I think of peace — peace 
like the soft, immeasurable, irresistible dew on the grass . . . 
peace like the thunder of the ice freezing at night in mountain 
lakes, like the relentless walk of glaciers, like the crushing, 
eternal power that is in a lily-seed in the ground, like the child 
stirring in its mother's womb. . . . Peace is an irresistible 



20 WE 

energy, a living thing full of ecstasy and tears, conceived in 
joy and born in pain, the first man-child of the world. 

I do not think it is going to do to think of Peace as a kind 
of big, proper, iron virgin any longer, as a figure out in front of 
Mr. Carnegie's Hague Monument, as a kind of sublime, cheer- 
less, international colossal statue of Lucia Ames Mead. 

We have thought of peace in this way long enough. 



LOOK III 

THE AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT AND WAR 

I 
. HAS AMERICA A CHARACTER OF HER OWN? 

WHAT one finds fault with . in our modern men who 
flourish around dreadnoughts and swing armies at 
people is not their fighting spirit, the brave, fine way 
they feel inside while they are expressing themselves in this way, 
but their technique. 

Dreadnoughts do not really express us — the righteous in- 
dignation, the hope for the world that we have in America, 
most of us, bottled up inside us. Our dreadnoughts never 
really make anybody see just what our feelings are about our 
enemies, or how we came to have them, or how we can get 
over them. They hurt us more than they hurt those who are 
wronging us. They never get the best of an enemy. They 
do not do with an enemy what we try to make them do. 

I believe that this is a universal instinct in America and 
can be politically depended on. I do not believe I am a bit 
lonely or ahead of my time in feeling as I do about dread- 
noughts. 

As a fighter I have much the same feeling about dreadnoughts 
that I have about those rather simple old-fashioned ideas of 
fighting that one finds in a man like David, for instance, three 
thousand years ago. Where David really outdid himself was 
in his imprecatory 'psalms. They were the best imprecatory 
psalms that anybody has ever written or could possibly hope to 

21 



22 WE 

write. But his fighting, or his idea of fighting (a thing Hke 
jumping on his enemy's neck, for instance), is second-rate, and 
it does not seem to me that any man can fairly claim that as 
a means of self-expression it levels up anywhere near to the 

psalms. 

Not that I have any prejudice against it because it is old- 
fashioned, or just David's way. My contention is that as an 
adaptation of means to ends, getting ahead of an enemy by 
jumping on his neck does not work. It may be natural, but 
it's just a habit, and no man who stops to think what he really 
wants to get out of an enemy, how he can get some real satis- 
faction with him, sets any great store by it. I appeal to any 
man's personal experience, as a boy, or as a man, if this is not 
so. 

Of course it is not to be denied that at first sight there is 
something fetching about dreadnoughts. They are so big and 
deceitful and so dignified-looking. But reduce a dreadnought 
to its lowest terms — to a small boy in the street, for instance, 
using his fists on some other small boy because he is too stupid 
or lazy to understand him — and anybody, any grown person 
going by, would feel like stepping in and pointing out some 
better way — some way that would work better. And of course 
what holds good for a small boy in getting what he wants holds 
good for a nation in getting it. 

One of the reasons that nations very often are more super- 
ficial than almost anybody in them is that a nation very seldom 
gets personal enough to be deep. The only chance a nation ever 
really has to have a deep minute is to reduce itself suddenly to 
Its lowest terms, to how a single man in it would act and what 
he would find it best to be like, if he is dealing with a particular 
situation. 

Now here for instance (if I may again lend myself to this 
nation !) is the way I act myself, when I am confronted over and 
over again with some one who is thinking he is my enemy or who 
is working away on the problem of making me think he is. 



HAS AMERICA A CHARACTER? 23 

I come, as a matter of fact, usually to taking his word more or 
less for it. Then — I might as well be frank about it — my back 
is up. I don't propose to let him bump into me and determine 
once for all of his own sweet will by one bump — that I am to be 
the same kind of an enemy that he is, and let him choose for me 
my way of fighting him as well as his way of fighting me. I do 
not see why I should step out of my shoes and be somebody else 
because he does it. I assert myself. I may storm around 
awhile a little as he does but I cannot do it very well or keep it 
up. Almost anybody can beat me storming around and I have 
been driven probably to it. I soon drift back anyway into jog- 
ging along and being myself, and I find that the most natural 
thing for me to do with an enemy is to pick out the particular 
thing he has that I want most and then think up the best and 
most thorough way to get it. To reduce the matter to its lowest 
terms, what it all practically amounts to, at least for me, is this: 

The one thing I want of an enemy most, I find, usually when 
I look into it, is to finish him. I want to wipe him out as an 
enemy. I do not want him to look wiped out, nor do I want 
him to palm off on me a few simple, humble, wiped-out looking 
actions. I want to fight to a finish. 

And it always works out in about the same way, fighting 
to a finish. I find it never seems to be enough for me, with an 
enemy, to whip his body. I want to whip him. And a little 
simple thoughtless thing like jumping on his neck or like hacking 
meat off the outside of him never seems to last long enough. 
It does not touch a man's imagination to jump on his neck. He 
never seems to realize how important I am when I jump on his 
neck. He just gently stops realizing anj^thing. And making 
him realize is the real fun in it for me. Going and standing by 
his grave and thinking there by myself all cold and lonely, how I 
have licked him, is not filling. And of course I cannot call 
down to him there under the wreaths and the mown grass and 
start him up thinking how superior I am. Oh ! how I want him 
where I can watch him feeling licked ! 



24 WE 

And what is more, I want to lick him in such a thorough, 
unexpected and fetching way that he will just have to stop 
while I'm doing it, tell me I'm an artist, make me an offer on the 
spot, ask me if I don't want to join in with him and lick some 
other fellow. Then between us we would lick the world. 

There is no real fun in licking a man until one can get him to 
like it and join in and help. If what one wants to do with an 
enemy is to break through the walls of his being and assail, 
conquer and possess his imagination, the whole secret works in 
the man, fight hini to a finish, wipe him out as an enemy, this is 
the only way to do it. 

This is the way I believe America feels. 

This is our national temperament. We want to make a 
complete successful self-assertion with those who think they are 
our enemies. 

We don't agree with them, that is all. And we propose to 
express this idea to them in our way and not theirs. We pro- 
pose to make a dreadnought look foolish, to make a dread- 
nought look ashamed and feel afraid. Any nation that will 
shoot at a nation that has the nerve to stand up unarmed to be 
shot at, will be wiped off the face of the earth. It will wipe off 
itself if no one else does. It will have too little moral fibre to 
stand having to look at itself. It will feel too cowardly to waiiT 
to live. 



II 

IS AMERICA AFRAID TO EXPRESS HER CHAR- 
ACTER IN HER OWN WAY? 

W^hen I think of the mighty splendid whispers of the guns, 
of the subhme, soundless roar of the submarines, of the low, still 
whistling of the airships — of all those magnificent whispers un- 
heard even by angels, between Berlin, Paris, London, and New 
York, reaching across the sky . . . and when I think it is 
only little pathetic schoolboy persons — persons who ought to 
be set down hard in a row, one after the other, and spanked, 
who have taken possession of all these godlike things and are 
using them to fight with, and to whisper their little dull whispers 
on them — I am filled with the sense that what it is that has 
really happened to us to-day is the Rape of the Machines. 
We have been careless. We have been busy and unconscious. 
We have let the wrong people run them. 

Once on an Atlantic liner a few years ago when the wireless 
was first being used, a man was waked up at three in the morning 
for a message which half of heaven and half of earth had brought 
to him. 

This was the message he received, standing, shivering and 
anxious, in his pajamas: '*Hope you are having a pleasant voy- 
age. Tra la. John and Mary." 

This is not a bad parable of the war. It is a John and Mary 
war. Magnificent machines only make a little-minded man 
littler-minded on a larger scale. Dreadnoughts are an invention 
for makmg idiots sublime. 

This is what has happened to us. Machines are godlike. And 
men who make them are godlike, too. The next thing we are 

25 



26 ^^^ 

going to do is to see that the men who have the great conceptions 
of the machines shall keep control of their machines themseh^es 
and use their machines to express more great conceptions. 

Here are our American conceptions for instance. Our con- 
ception of our own nation and of the world is one that can no 
more be expressed by dreadnoughts than it could by pop-guns. 

When we were very little boys, some of us, we tried to express 
how great America was on the Fourth of July by taking little 
round white paper chunks (everybody remembers them— they 
were a kind of popcorn of patriotism) and throwing them vio- 
lently on the stones. 

The stones stood it very well, and we felt (at that time) per- 
fectly expressed. 

But bursting a shell over the heads of people we want to ex- 
press ourselves to, taking 20,000 tons of earth (62 feet square 
and 15 feet deep) out of the ground, and then making a cloud of 
dust out of it, a kind of yellow sky — 20,000 tons of earth that 
drift away in the heavens and never come back, two hundred 
yoimg men under it unscathed, untouched, with their eyes put 
out for fifty years and their ears like stones until they die — this 
does not express us to these young men, nor does it express any 
feelings that we have ever had toward them or toward their 
nations or that we ever will. The conceptions we are trying to 
express of America are very different from this, and this form of 
expression seems to us to be stupid, scared, lazy and neither pow- 
erful nor accurate nor far-reaching enough, nor lasting enough to 
express any nation we know or have ever heard of on this earth. 

America would be willing to express itself to a big, good- 
natured, and rather lazy mountain in this way down at Panama 
—stave a hole in it that all a world can use. This same exclam- 
atory and rather rudimentary form of expressing the will, the 
desire, the prayer of a mighty people for all the other peoples, 
seems to us noble, beautiful, if sublimely and accurately aimed. 
A mountain for instance understands it and is deeply moved by 
It, or the bottom of the sea, but as an expression of what one 



IS AiVIERICA APRAID OF HER CHARACTER? 27 

nation feels or ever can begin to feel for another it seems to us 
clumsy, feeble, unpractical and helpless. 

We do not say it is right or wrong. We say simply that this 
way of expressing ourselves to other nations does not show them 
what we are like. Increasing our armament does not satisfy us 
as our main reliance and our main expense in defending us from 
other nations because, as it seems to us, the way to compel other 
nations to be at peace with us is to compel them to understand 
us. It is natural to us to defend ourselves to people by express- 
ing to people what we are like, what we want and what we want 
to give and what we want to get; and dreadnoughts and sub- 
marines say all the things about us that we do not mean, and 
they say none of the things that we do. Ford cars and phono- 
graphs express us better and telephones and movie machines 
that a world will have to use. Ford cars and telephones and 
moving-picture machines, sleeping cars, elevators, and flying 
ships — Glen Curtiss and Wilbur Wright in the sky — really give 
some true idea of what America is like, and of the kind of in- 
stincts and gifts we have for doing our share of the team-work 
of a world, things we think of for a world to use, and for our- 
selves. The phonograph is like us. The typewriter and the 
phonograph, the airbrake, aluminium, Luther Burbank, Henry 
Ford, Edison and the skyscraper are like us. They go with our 
temperament. So do our folding beds, our shoes, our dentists, 
Gillette razors, harvesting machines, steam plows — and in a 
humble way even our bathtubs express our genius for fitting 
out a comfortable and convenient planet. It took a democracy 
studying out the comfort and dignity of life for everybody to 
think out bathrooms for the kings and courts of Europe. 

As humble as it is, even a porcelain bathtub or a Gillette razor 
expresses us better, makes more people understand us and have 
more use for us, than a thousand idiotic submarines or sense- 
lessly ingenious dreadnoughts or stupidly terrible Krupps could 
in a thousand years. We want to be terrible by being of some 
use. We propose to defend ourselves with a terrific indispen- 



28 WE 

sableness. Our brains work in this way. We cannot get inter- 
ested in being shrewd about kilHng off people with whom we 
work, or in wiping off the earth the countries in which we play. 
Submarines show off better and we admit that fitting up an 
entire planet with our ideas of plumbing, with American bath- 
tubs, is humble and homely. Safety razors are too. We do 
not deny it. But these things express our feelings better toward 
people. Submarines would lie. We would really rather bathe 
people than drown them, and we -would rather shave them than 
cut their throats, and blowing out a canal for people's ships suits 
us better than blowing up the people and blowing up the ships. 
It is the way we feel and precisely expresses what we feel. Just 
plain empty blowing up does not. The world may say we are a 
great prosy nation, that we are not romantic enough about our 
emotions to fight. But this is our emotion. We have a huge 
national emotion — an insistence in the face of all the nations on 
being ourselves and expressing ourselves. If the world tells us 
we are afraid to fight, we reply that the way to fight other na- 
tions is to touch their imaginations with what we have that they 
want, with what we want that they have. 

It seems to us that with a truly terrible, irresistible thing we 
have to defend ourselves with, with a huge daily outfit of the 
living needs of a whole world to swing at our belt, and strike a 
world with, it is childish and thoughtless to deck ourselves out 
with little flags, hobby horses, pop-guns and toy ships and 
bluster and make a great noise about how dreadful and how im- 
portant we are and how we do not need anybody, do not want 
anybody, and can whip the world. We say the exact opposite. 
We do want everybody. And everybody wants us. 

It IS because shooting is feeble, is incompetent, because 
shooting does not touch the imaginations of nations and does not 
express what we have to say to them and what we want to get 
from them and give to them and accomplish with them that w^e, 
the American people, are reserved and critical toward the pro- 
posed program of military experts. It seems to us that they 



IS AMERICA AFRAID OF HER CHARACTER? 29 

are rather parochial persons employed by us to do a particular 
thing in the way of preparedness and that they are not capable 
either by training or temperament of thinking of other things. 
We want a stiffer, more exacting and comprehensive program 
of preparedness than they do. A pitiful, small, niggling idea of 
what preparedness is — a mere idea of increasing armaments for 
our own defense, does not satisfy the American people. We 
look upon the kind of preparedness that is being proposed for us 
by the Government as not being preparedness enough. The 
program of preparedness that is being placed before Congress 
and that the people are watching Congress vote money and 
men for to-day stands for about one half of one per cent, of the 
preparedness America wants and is bound to have. 

We propose to defend ourselves and stand up for the peace of 
the world here in America all over, with everything that we do 
and with every way in which we do it. Every man of us every 
day, all day, is going to fight for his country. Instead of fighting 
in trenches, each man of us behind his counter and behind his 
desk all day, every day, with every breath of his body and 
thought of his heart, every bargain, every promise to pay and 
every promise to act, is going to make America and American 
citizenship stand for the peace of America and for the credit 
and the safety of the world. 

In the Government's proposed program of preparedness we 
demand not merely the Government's recognition, protection, 
and organization of the army, but the recognition, protection, 
and organization of the people, of the wills of the people and of 
the intentions of the people. It is through the personalities, the 
powers, the business gifts, the advertising genius, the dramatic 
actions of the people that the American Government is going to 
defend the American continent from hostile attack from other 
nations. It is on the organization and the expression of the 
wills of the people we want the Government's skill and the Gov- 
ernment's money spent. And when we see our Government 
down in Washington planning its scheme of national defense, 



so WE 

talking and acting and spending money as if it were only going to 
be through a little loophole of exceptional actions like battles, of 
exceptional and out-of-the-way persons like generals and admir- 
als and soldiers, that this country can construct its program of 
defense, it is unbearable to us. It does not represent us. We 
are no longer willing to let Congress discuss an anxious, fuming 
jerk of preparedness in the form of a big army and navy as if it 
were preparedness enough for a great nation like ours. 

We, the normal rank and file of the people of America, the 
plain folks of this new continent — we who are doing and will have 
to do daily ninety -nine and a half per cent, of what really de- 
fends this country — demand of Congress a program that reckons 
with us; we demand that we no longer be slurred over in the 
national estimate and national appropriation for the program 
of national defense, that we no longer be poohed at by generals 
and admirals as if we did not exist as defenders of the nation or 
as if what we did for it did not count. Everybody knows that it 
is we, the people of America, what we are like as a people and 
not like, what we do and do not do, that is to determine the atti- 
tude of nations toward us, and that nine hundred and ninety- 
nine chances out of a thousand it is we and not our generals and 
admirals who will constitute the one defense that will save the 
nation from hostile attack. 

I am not necessarily committed, at least in a reasonable form 
and degree, against the program of preparedness being brought 
up before Congress, but when I hear our generals and admirals 
and our A. Wise Woods speaking of preparedness as if it were 
solely their subject, when I overhear them talking down in 
Washington in a hoity-toity expert mood, speaking of the people 
as nobodies and dealing with the defense of the nation as a sub- 
head under an Academy at West Point or under a Navy Yard at 
Annapolis, it has seemed to me necessary to devote a book just 
at this time to the larger, more important, more constructive 
means of self-defense that America will soon be carrying out 
without running and asking Mr. A. Wise Wood and General 



IS AMERICA AFRAID OF HER CHARACTER? 31 

Leonard Wood. So I am dealing in the following chapters with 
the means of self-defense the nation can be using daily, all the 
time, instead of generals and admirals and other exceptions — 
experts in running to fires the people will never let occur, special- 
ists in repelling attacks upon our people that the people wiU 
have made incredible, hopeless, groundless and impossible and 
will never invite. 

The claim I am making in behalf of the Government's recog- 
nizing in its plans and appropriations the plain people as de- 
fenders of this nation may sound a good deal like a generalization 
at first, as I put it in this chapter, but it will stop being a general- 
ization before the end of this book. I had hoped to state at this 
point just what form my program would take, a program of 
organizing a people instead of merely organizing an army, to 
defend the nation — this more universal and stupendous pre- 
paredness in which we all are to have a part. I had begun to 
try to present it in a paragraph on this page, but, when I saw it 
— this more stupendous preparedness, this ninety-million man- 
power Preparedness — stooping and trying to peek in at a great 
nation helplessly through a paragraph, I stopped. 

An old program could be introduced in a few words before 
being dealt with in detail and everybody would know it and 
reckon with it at once, but a new and original one — one that has 
not been proposed yet — would perhaps have to be given time to 
be conceived and to be born first and to grow up in the reader's 
mind first as it has had to grow up in mine. 



There might be one word more of understanding with the 
reader. Please do not feel that this book is all going to be like 
the next fifty pages on Mr. Carnegie's peace and Mr. Rocke- 
feller's peace. Before going on to put up the new superstruc- 
ture of peace as planned, some sort of cellar has to be provided 
of course for the foundations of peace to go up around. And I 
have had to begin with some blasting. 



LOOK IV 

MR. CARNEGIE AND HIS PEACE-FLOCK 

I 
DOES MR. CARNEGIE EXPRESS AMERICA? 

SOME of us who have speciahzed in modern human nature 
find it a Httle hard not to have moments in which, in 
spite of ourselves, we feel a little condescending toward 
wealth — toward almost everything in fact except the very latest 
thing in millionaires. The latest improvements in millionaires 
are making it harder every day for the others to struggle along, 
especially our old, faithful, mid- Victorian model — a kind of 
standardized millionaire like Mr. Carnegie. 

I have been looking in the New York Times to-day at a picture 
of Mr. Carnegie at his desk, surrounded by photographs, vistas 
of pigeonholes reaching around, sitting there in that kind of calm 
glory of benevolence, before us all, gazing out at his country as 
the Peace Founder of the World. 

I have repeatedly said that Mr. Carnegie, like all men, cannot 
be cut out of his time and judged aside from the generation that 
produced him. But as Mr. Carnegie is still living and doing 
things— may break out with benevolence any minute, may take 
a million dollars and hold back the age with it any minute, we 
have to deal with him as a part of the situation as it is to-day, 
and in a desperate crisis for peace, like the present, a kind of 
surgical crisis in the thought, in the working ideal of the world, I 
want to cut down through feelings and shadings that might be 
considered at another time— strip everything off in the way— 

32 



DOES MR. CARNEGIE EXPRESS AMERICA? 33 

and, grasping every comparison and every contrast I can, make 
clear my point. I must express my idea whether or no, and 
Andrew Carnegie is a part of the working vocabulary of this 
nation; he is wrought into the imagination of all of us. One 
cannot keep from using words in the Dictionary because their 
feelings might be hurt. They are there. 

I am not blaming Mr. Carnegie as a man. I am merely point- 
ing out in what I say that that is all he is, merely a man, and 
that he has no right to become an institution. 

I am afraid of what Mr. Carnegie as an institution may do to 
the cause of peace. If I were not writing on some subject like 
Peace, if I were writing on some subject that Mr. Carnegie had 
not fenced off, piled up millions of dollars on and taken in a way 
for his own, I would not have to be personal in order to make 
my point. 

But I can only say what I have come to believe. 

Benevolent millionaires like Mr. Carnegie are one of the great 
standing threats in America at the life of our nation. 

Bad millionaires are going to be looked after by publicity. 
Government action and social ostracism. We comparatively 
understand what they are doing toward the disorganization of 
the life and work and play and religion of our people. We have 
been gaining in insight. Crowds see through millionaires in the 
streets. 

The only method by which a millionaire can befuddle the 
American people now is by being good, by doing things that 
make him look good, by doing morally handsome things. 

It is the only chance an uncreative millionaire has left, to take 
up one after the other good things other people have thought 
of, that other people have got started, and muss them all up with 
money; i. e., put money in front of ideas, initiatives and individ- 
ualities. 

Mr. Carnegie is not unlike other people. He is just himself; 
has built himself up out of a foundry, and he turns everything 
into foundries that he touches, and always will. He cannot help 



34 WE 

it. He cannot be blamed in a way for doing it. We are to be 
blamed for letting him do it. We have watched him for now these 
twenty years, innocently banging about, lording over cities with 
libraries, steering culture with checks, leading great universities 
by pensions. We have seen colleges putting their creeds in their 
hip pockets and holding out their hands. We have seen Mr. 
Carnegie buying off the intellectual hardihood of big professors, 
the educational consciences of faculties; we have stood by and 
seen him taking the whole educational system of this nation and 
all our best intellectual centres and turning them into great 
spiritual machine shops — big wildernesses of mechanical-minded - 
ness — and doing it all because everybody in sight wants a dollar 
and a half and because everybody bows and scrapes, resigns, 
steps one side, and asks, " What do j'^ou want, Mr. Carnegie? It 
shall be yours!" 

All this is an infinitely more serious threat at the life of this 
nation, at the vitahty, virility of this nation, than a frank, bold, 
perfectly safe rascal like Jesse James — safe because nobody takes 
him seriously. 

This is why I am speaking up as I do. 

I have been looking again at the full-page picture of Mr. Car- 
negie to-day in the Times. And it has all come over me again. 
I cannot bear it to see him sitting with that old gentle glow of 
self-satisfaction on his face, and every man and woman and child 
in sight encouraging him to be funnier and funnier. And almost 
nobody saying anything. 

There seems to be a strange national calmness about Mr. Car- 
negie. No wonder England misunderstands what America is 
like. Do they not see Mr. Carnegie over there strutting up and 
down half the year, with Triumphant Democracy in his pocket 
and with college presidents and dignitaries all trooping over on 
the Lusitania to see him five minutes? When they see Mr 
Carnegie and his fortune like a kind of promontory on America 
stretchmg out toward the Old World, they think it is America' 

To sit down and take Mr. Carnegie seriously, to consider 



DOES MR. CARNEGIE EXPRESS AMERICA? 35 

Mr. Carnegie as so many practically do, as the fountain and 
the well-spring of peace, or as one who can determine in any 
slight degree policies or appropriations, or select persons or 
ideas in determining a world-peace, is the sort of thing that 
makes our nation look abroad at times like a kind of lazy, good- 
natured caricature of itself. 

The caricature cannot be stopped. 

But at least our people can keep from signing it. 

I have already devoted a book or so to saying that the only 
possible good or harm any man can do in this world with money 
is the way he makes it. 

We have the spectacle in this country of several hundred 
colleges, thousands of professors and supposed leaders of thought, 
mobs of social workers, synods, presbyteries, librarians and 
clergymen, being deferential to Andrew Carnegie to-day not be- 
cause of the way he has got his money but because he has got 
it. 

Deferentialness to Andrew Carnegie has come to be one of 
the diseases of this nation. Nations have to go through their 
children's diseases of course, but it does seem as if America 
might have produced among us all some one to make Mr. 
Carnegie ridiculous, or as if we might have been able, from one 
end of the country to the other, to hunt up one college that 
would show how funny in the role of a really serious or impor- 
tant person Mr. Carnegie is. 

Not until Andrew Carnegie is seen standing with his hat in his 
hand outside our college doors, saying please to them, asking 
to be let in, asking to be allowed to be an ofl&ce-boy, asking to 
please be trusted to run a few errands with his money, will 
either our colleges or our Carnegies be anything other than a 
great, calm, heavy, soggy, self-complacent menace at the grit, 
manhood, independence and spiritual lustiness of this nation. 

It is not his money, but his mind — the fact that he is imposing 
so many million dollars' worth of his mind a year on this coun- 
try — that we object to. 



36 WE 

\ man who has made a comparative failure of his Hfe should 
not be allowed to dictate the vision, the life, the spirit, the mti- 
mate ideals and motives of all the youth and faculties of our 

^ How many people who are going to these colleges want to 
be like Mr. Carnegie, stripped of his money, or want their 
sons like him? Mr. Carnegie, if he had a son himself, would 
not want him to be like him. He would want him to have a 
different kind of mind. And yet the uppermost influences in 
the life of our universities are being massively, negatively deter- 
mined, through power of selection of persons and emphasis of 
standards and methods, by a man we all know who cannot 
contain himself with self-satisfaction, who is seen before us 
all almost any day reeking and sweating with his own glory, 
who lives surrounded by a frieze of his own honours, who hangs 
trophies of himself upon his walls. . . . 

^Ye are face to face with a fact in America. Unless we can 
make our great fortunes in America humble and inquiring for- 
tunes, we are not a great people. 

The men we defer to are the men who see and express the 
desires and ideals of our people. 

Mr. Carnegie has been slowly, unconsciously putting shocks 
into us, of truth about men and money in this country. With 
him to help, we see now what we really believe. He is making 
us see that money is the back-door of every enterprise — the 
kitchen-end. "Go around and bring in your money, coal, cab- 
bages, through the back-door, please. Only those who visit 
with our souls and sit by our firesides can ring the front-door 
bell of this nation." 

This is what America is beginning to say. 

Millionaires who do not look humble, who are not open and 
comfy with folks, and who do not feel a certain genuine yearn- 
ing to know what crowds know and to feel what crowds feel, 
who do not long to get acquainted with crowds and express them 
and be expressed by them are threats against our national life. 



DOES MR. CARNEGIE EXPRESS AMERICA? 37 

I have already put myself on record and have said the pleas- 
anter things there are to say in a chapter called, "Mr. Carnegie 
as an Experiment Station in Millionaires," elsewhere,* but in 
the meanwhile, as the months have rolled by, and I have been 
watching the spectacle of what is going on, of what the nation 
is being confronted with week by week in its colleges and in its 
universities and the influences that are getting uppermost in 
these deep, intimate places in the nation's spiritual life, where 
the supposed leaders of our people are being created have been 
too much for me. I am afraid that what Mr. Carnegie has 
done to our colleges he will do to Peace. I look upon the un- 
covering of Andrew Carnegie as a person to be particularly de- 
ferred to by America, as one of our pressing, immediate, national 
necessities. 

The one great single threatening disaster that can confront 
a nation in a machine age is to grow mechanical-minded. 

Cities full of iron and wooden pegs in factories, called people 
— cities full of cash-registers, of metronomes called people — 
crowds of minds full of clockwork just ticking and ticking away 
just alike with no courage, individuality, no imagination, and 
no initiative — are what we are facing to-day. 

Mr. Carnegie has thrown his fortune like some great, cheerful, 
self-complacent, smiling millstone around the necks of the 
men who in the factories and streets and in our universities are 
making a fight for imagination, initiative, freedom from routine, 
personality and courage in American life. 

We cannot hope for much in Mr. Carnegie's peace enterprise 
or anything else he is interested in until we are disillusionized 
as a people about Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Carnegie is disillu- 
sionized about himself. 

No man who has been deeply concerned about our colleges, 
or who has watched the effect of Mr. Carnegie's money upon 
the gusto of our intellectual and spiritual life, upon the haughti- 



Inspired Millionaires," p. 256. 



38 WE 



ness 



and the supremacy of the soul in American hfe, can do 
otherwise than dread what Mr. Carnegie may do to Peace. 

Making Mr. Carnegie ridiculous, keeping America or any- 
body in America from deferring to anything Mr. Carnegie has 
or anything he does, stripping Mr. Carnegie to the waistline, 
having this nation pound on his chest, sound his head, and then 
measure him soul and body precisely for what he is— I look upon 
this as one of the next important things we have to attend to 
in this country. We are going to speak up to him out from 
under his libraries— under his colleges, clear our minds, blow^ a 
breeze through the land of fresh thinking, of personal idealism 
—of our own original self-respecting, self-supporting spiritual 
life. Colleges that defer to Mr. Carnegie cannot educate any- 
body. 

We have no grudge against Mr. Carnegie. We merely pro- 
test that as a spiritual expert in what the picked young men 
of this country need and have got to have unless they stay out 
of college, Mr. Carnegie is not a success. 

It seems to us it would be better if Mr. Carnegie would put 
in his spiritual labours, if he must, on aged millionaires, on 
people that cannot be spoiled any more now probably, and leave 
our young men and the teachers of our young men, the inspirers 
of the future leaders of our people, alone. 

Why do not millionaires like Mr. Carnegie scoop up harbours, 
excavate mountains and build tunnels and lay out roads and 
run stone crushers? The great precious things, the heritage 
and the hopes and the prayers of the souls of the people — the 
arts and the sciences, literature, religion, the amusements of 
the people — must be dominated by men who have million- 
dollar ideas, by men who are as rich in imagination about people, 
in imagination of the people and for the people, as Mr. Carnegie 
is rich with the money of the people. 

As one goes about the country and studies the drift and 
emphasis of our American academic life and the personalities 
that are being attracted to it and repelled by it, Mr. Carnegie's 



DOES MR. CARNEGIE EXPRESS AMERICA? 39 

pensions can be felt like a kind of intellectual fog hanging every- 
where over all the colleges of the land. College professors are 
almost coming to be now a kind of temperament by themselves 
in American life. One feels them walking softly and pattering 
about with their minds. We see fewer and fewer every year 
who speak up. In a faintly black delicate mist of discretion 
in the bold and wicked world they go about whispering and 
thinking. They wonder gently what millionaires think. 

Even the man who is the least like this of us all, who is almost 
the most independent, scrupulous, high-minded, courageous 
college professor America has produced, felt he really ought to 
drop a line to Mr. Carnegie and ask Mr. Carnegie to let him 
know if it would do for him to take a little time off from being 
a college professor to be President of the United States. Would 
Mr. Carnegie or would he not charge him for it at the rate of 
three thousand a year for the rest of his life ? 

It is not a criticism of the President or of Mr. Carnegie I 
am making in this observation. It is a criticism of the country 
and of its being a country which waits for Mr. Carnegie to say 
Yes or to say No. 

Mr. Carnegie is wont to say he holds his money as a trust for 
the country and for the people and for the institutions of the 
people. 

If this is so, let him go around to the back-door and leave it. 
Let him stop having college presidents go around to the back- 
door to ask for it. 

Then we will feel as generously, as tenderly toward Mr. 
Carnegie as I would this minute if Mr. Carnegie would stop 
being a great threatening national, international institution and 
would be just plain and simple Andrew Carnegie. 

If there were any way to-day of making Mr. Andrew Carnegie 
as humble, as considerate before his nation as we know he must 
be with individual persons he loves — as he would be with his 
own wife — then with all his faults would we not rush in or be 
ready to rush in to 900 Fifth Avenue (when asked) with love, 



40 WE 

forgiveness, and expectation? (I would even be doing it now if 
I didn't hold in.) But Mr. Carnegie has become an insti- 
tution. He has chosen it. He hkes being an institution. As 
an institution, as a man who is spending millions of dollars 
a year in disagreeing with me, who has a million dollars to 
spend in expressing his ideas to this nation where I can spend 
one dollar in expressing mine, or one dollar in getting anybody 
to listen to mine or believe mine, I cannot otherwise than take 
my stand against Mr. Carnegie in defense of Peace — in defense 
of an idea of peace, which naked and of itself and woven out of 
little filigrees of paper and of ink, and faint little mists of words, 
without a dollar to help it, without a dollar to hinder it, I cast 
as seed upon the hearts of men until it shall cover the face of 
the earth. 



II 

EVERYBODY SPEAKS UP 

Peace is here. Peace is not something to be got up, worked 
• out, or made up. It does not come under the head of prophecy. 
Peace is history. 

All we have to do is to see what has happened to make any- 
thing happen we want. 

The peace I have in mind is not going to cost anything. It 
is here. It is a possession. The only money that could be 
spent on it would be in letting people all know about it. Peace 
in America has an address. One can give names, dates, and 
places for Peace. All that money can do is to point out to 
everybody who the men are who possess peace, and how they 
are doing their work with it. Then everybody will see how it 
works. Then everybody will have peace. 

Mr. Carnegie is proceeding on the idea that peace is expen- 
sive, and that we must all put our hands in our pockets and be 
good to it. I feel (and there are thousands of business men in 
this country who feel) like saying to Mr. Carnegie, Peace does 
not cost money. It makes money. 

If Mr. Carnegie had made his money out of peace, out of a 
high gear of peace with his employees and peace with his con- 
sumers, as Henry Ford does, he would recognize peace when he 
saw some. He would not have to set up a Moralizing Station 
for it. He would uncover it, keep still, let people look in quietly, 
eagerly and watch peace work and see it turn the big wheels. 

Instead of Mr. Carnegie's going about faintly, prettily, with 
his atomizer or spray of good advice to all nations, sprinkling 
morality about, he will concentrate on developing a peace-plant 

41 



4, WE 

at home-a Niagara of peace. We have the lay of the land for 
a Niagara of peace. We will put two hundred power-houses 
on it and sell peace-current to a world. It is peace-volts the 
world wants. The moment class war stops, as it is being 
obliged to stop in American business to-day, we will have the 

volts. 

What America says about peace will go. 

What Mr. Carnegie says about peace does not go. 

Mr. Carnegie should stop trying to speak directly and with 
his own voice to the nations. He should speak through America 
as his megaphone. 

Here is iVmerica. What has peace done for it? What is it 
doing? The peace energy is here. It is in the air, in the 
ground and in the hearts of the people. 

Peace is history. 

All we have to do is to look about us. All Mr. Carnegie has 
to do is to express and interpret what he sees about us. 



I have been sitting in my study writing these words this 
Saturday morning, in a great shout of boys' voices. It floats 
about me. Every minute or so I hear a long white roar, a 
kind of scoot of sound out of my window, and another double- 
ripper goes by down the long hill into the great still prairie of 
snow, into the vast, empty, lonely meadow that stretches for 
miles to the mountain. 

An hour or so ago, as I came out to the end of the drive in my 
yard and was just starting to go toward town, a whole double- 
ripper full of boys and girls — just ready to rip — just leaning over 
the edge of the hill to let go, held back hard and roared at me to 
jump on. 

They are always doing it. I hate to say 'No' so (when I 
have to) that sometimes I climb over my back fence and go to 
town the other way. A minute or so ago I happened to look out 
of the window and I saw that the young woman who writes these 



EVERYBODY SPEAKS UP 43 

pages over for me after I have crossed most of the words out, and 
who had just left me a second ago to hurry down street, had 
been swallowed up at the end of the yard by a huge double- 
ripper, and as I stood by the window there she was out there in 
that little long row of human beings with their knees up and their 
heads forward, and with their cheeks red, flying down the hill 
like mad into that huge empty meadow where a typewriter could 
not be seen for miles, where all the shorthand is by the sun or 
by the wind and where God alone takes notes ! 

She had completely forgotten me and forgotten "We" and 
was taking a nice, breathless, free, happy little parenthesis down 
there in the meadow, in her day's work, all because she had been 
swallowed up and grabbed away by a big joyous double-ripper. 

Nobody can get by one. The double-rippers on this hill have 
an insatiable appetite for folks. Sedate tottering old ladies 
even get picked off, and it is as much as anybody's life is worth 
to go by the end of the hill and not get swept right off down into 
the whiteness. 

Why is it the double-rippers are so altruistic, so anxious for 
folks? At first I wondered about the altruistic boys. Then my 
philosophy came to me. 

More people on, further you go. 

I had thought it was an interruption — the sound of the boys' 
voices — in this book. But it is not. The boys' shout is what 
this book is about. More people on, further yon go. 

Everybody is coming to see it. This is the main reason I 
am not worried about peace, because the world is getting into 
the hands of business men who see what the boys see — what any 
boy on High Street Hill sees — that the more people we can get 
to jump on with us the further we will go. The more there are 
to give weight and momentum, to bear down and to bear up and 
to drag the ripper up the hill, the more glad one is they got on. 
There always seems a time when things go hard (a double-ripper 
coming uphill is trying of course in its own sweet way all by it- 
self to rip backwards), but the more there are to enjoy the down- 



44 WE 

hill part of it, the more there are to work on the uphill part 

of it. 

This is the main idea of the labour unions. The only trouble 
is that the labour union does not always let the public get on. 

It is also the main idea of the trust. The only trouble is that 
it does not always let the public get on. 

This is Henry Ford's idea. 

There is nothing absolutely original about Henry Ford's idea. 
All the High Street boys have it. It is just the old familiar idea. 
More people get on, further you go, one finds in the New Testa- 
ment. What is original in Ford is the way he believes the old 
idea, the New Testament grit he has, the extraordinary unheard- 
of way he lets people get on. Anybody. Just as they come. 
He has let on a hundred and fifty ex-convicts, for instance, with 
the other 16,000 in the factory. He has let millions of his cus- 
tomers get on. They feel it is their ripper. All of his customers 
are on Henry Ford's Double-Ripper. If three hundred thousand 
Fords are sold this year — that is, if three hundred thousand 
people get on, every one of them will have fifty dollars handed 
back to him, taken off his bill. He has already told his employees 
if they will stop putting ashes on his track, stop soldiering 
and bothering the work, and doing as little work as they can, 
and will get on and stay on whole-heartedly, and swing their 
hats and shout and sweat for the business — be heavy going down- 
hill and pull going up — what he will do for them — and anybody 
can see what Henry Ford with all these millions of people on his 
ripper is daily putting himself in a position to do for others and 
to do for himself. Three classes of people, supposedly separate 
interests, are all piling on to Henry Ford's Double-Ripper. 
That is why it rips. 

Mr. Carnegie was a clever man for his generation. He was 
a bit original himself at first. That is to say, he let more people 
get on while he was getting rich than anybody ever had before. 
He let millionaires get on. Every time Carnegie saw^ a lively, 
would-be, could-be semi-millionairish looking kind of person run- 



EVERYBODY SPEAKS UP 45 

ning along out of breath beside him, who was trying to jump up, 
he looked him over and if he liked his points he let him get on. 
He reached out a hand to Friek in this way and to Schwab and 
to hundreds of others, men he had watched running and scram- 
bling and said: "Now climb up here with me, my boy, and we 
will get rich together." Carnegie has had a wake of millionaires 
he has made behind him all his life. 

They may not be much to be proud of, I admit. The 16,000 
workmen Henry Ford let get on and that I saw in Detroit the 
other day, flying down the hill with him, and pulling up the hill 
with him, and sweating joyfully, suit me better than Mr. Carne- 
gie's small and rather ugly collection of men he let get on. But 
Mr. Carnegie merely struck in and made a kind of beginning. 
It has taken a generation or so of trying to see how letting people 
get on works. Henry Ford has seen it earlier than some of us. 

The extraordinary thing that is happening to peace now is the 
general discovery that if this principle works one way it works 
the other. If it works for employers to let labouring men jump 
on the ripper, it works for labouring men to let employers jump 
on the ripper. One will not need to stand by very much longer 
and see the trusts and the big employers getting the benefit of 
the truth before the labour unions do. In a day or so, one will be 
seeing labour unions all over the country looming up out of all 
the others and acting the way Henry Ford does. 

As these unions will loom up among unions as Ford looms up 
among employers, everybody will notice peace. 

All labour will know peace works. Labour will be filled with 
news about peace. 



Ill 

TELESCOPES AND BENCHES 

Mr. Carnegie, at least so far as his Steel Trust is concerned, 
has never seemed to have what could be called exactly an other- 
worldly idea of steel. I wish he did not have a beautiful other- 
worldly idea of peace. I always think of Mr. Carnegie as looking 
at Peace as something far off. It seems to be a kind of straining, 
hoping and yearning subject to him. One thinks of him and all 
his good little boys with him as standing out in the cold, cold 
night with a telescope and looking at Peace as a star in the sky 
— very hard to get at and wishing it were not and wondering 
what it is. 

"Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star 
How I wonder what you are " 

Then he makes a great to-do and calls in all the nations to 
look. The nations do it to accommodate so rich a man, gather 
around, of course, rather stern and rather bored and absent- 
minded, and look through the telescope. That is all. 

All this discourages me, or rather it discourages me when I 
forget and find myself taking Mr. Carnegie and his peace-flock 
seriously. 

When I begin to think, I feel better. I remember that Mr. 
Carnegie is not what one could really call a spiritually robust 
man. It ought not to be expected of him after his strained life. 
It is only fair not to overlook this. (Probably this is why Mr. 
Carnegie and his people always seem to me a little ungrown and 
sentimental toward Peace. They always seem to be standing 

46 



TELESCOPES AND BENCHES 47 

and looking so earnestly at Peace — like Burne-Jones' young 
women — just looking and yearning.) 

I am weary of hearing peace spoken of or conceived as a dove. 
That has been attended to. It was well enough in a way at the 
right time to speak of peace as a dove. It is all that peace once 
was — a dove. But peace is not a dove — now, or at least if peace 
is a dove now I wish it would fly away. 

And I am weary of hearing peace spoken of as a lamb. 

I am weary of having peace looked at as a great, beautiful, ex- 
pensive subject remote from common people — a subject that 
only a millionaire really and his little tame flock of hired high- 
brows could expect to afford to dabble their minds in. What 
ordinary folks know about peace and can do for world-peace at 
home and in their own lives and by hand and all without great, 
costly, spiritual derricks, wonderful spiritual pile-drivers, huge, 
costly, nation-sized moral scoops or dredges, is supposed to be 
negligible. 

This is the whole point I wish to make in behalf of America. 
We wish to get Peace away from Mr. Carnegie and his telescope, 
grab it away forever, get it over into our own hands as a subject 
belonging to us — to any workman with a paper cap on. We pro- 
pose to settle world-peace ourselves. If we find there is any 
little way with a few million dollars that Mr. Carnegie from up 
in his peace-observatory can help, we will let him in. If he will 
know his place he can help. 

But to us, peace is very different. World-peace to us is not 
in an observatory. It is at the next bench. It is at the desk in 
the oJ05ce. W^e believe that if Mr. Carnegie and his hired high- 
brows will come down from their telescope and will (just with 
their plain eyes open) go walking around among us in the sweat 
and din of our shops, they will see enough Peace in a week scat- 
tered all around this country right down next to the ground, in 
every man's life, to pry this old world straight! No one has 
looked around. That is the trouble. We have all been running 
to Mr. Carnegie's telescope pointed grandly at the sky, and we 



48 WE 

have supposed in some vague way we would have to wait to see 

Peace come pouring down backwards out of heaven through it. 

The idea has seemed to be when it began to pour, that we 
would just slowly steer the telescope (with enough millions to 
help budge it), aiming it now over one nation and now over 
another, and pour peace— a kind of thin stream of peace, a kind 
of sluice of starlight of peace, one hundred and eighty-six million 
miles a second — down on it. This is as much as could be hoped 
for. 

Is this true? 

But I do not see how we can do otherwise than to speak up at 
this time, at this fork of the road for the nations, when they are 
turning to us and wondering which way we may go, what is in us 
and what we are really like, and say to them all, quite loudly and 
distinctly — to England, Germany, and the rest (who know Mr. 
Carnegie so much better than they know us) — that Mr. Carnegie 
is not America, that he is just our Mr. Carnegie, just our dear, 
beautiful monster! We have produced him, but that is no rea- 
son why, with all his helpless millions on him, he should turn 
around on us and try to produce us. We take our stand before 
the nations on this. We want to be understood. 

Our colleges and universities may keep very still, but they do 
(at least, it must be said for them) go about to one another in a 
kind of hushed laughter and dismay about Mr. Carnegie, and 
everywhere our common people — the vast common sense of our 
nation— is getting him right. We make little stir about this. 
We go on our way taking it for granted, but it is a fact about us. 
The one deference we have or can ever work up for any million- 
aire in America to-day is the way he makes his money. After 
that, when he is spending it, he must look out for himself and 
stand up for himself as best he can. 

This is America's Notice herewith served on England, Ger- 
many, France, Russia and Japan. The peace we propose to 
confront them with is ours, our own home-brand, and not Mr. 
Carnegie's. 



TELESCOPES AND BENCHES 49 

Peace is not a moral at the end of a man's life to present to 
other people. 

It is a powerful way of making money. The moment Mr. 
Carnegie begins to express this idea of peace, he will find he will 
not have to tease the nations. 



IV 
MR. CARNEGIE AND THE PEOPLE 

One day a year or so ago I read in my morning paper an ac- 
count of how Mr. Carnegie the night before at a dinner gave the 
churches in America a handsome two-milhon-doUar tip for what 
they had done and might do yet for Peace of the Nations. He 
invited cardinals, archbishops and bishops, elders and clergymen 
to dine with him; singled out forty men by name as trustees for 
the $2,000,000 the churches have to spend on Mr. Carnegie's 
idea of peace. 

Now what I am wondering is : Is Mr. Carnegie's idea of peace 
worth quite two million dollars? I cannot help wondering if it 
would not be better for Mr. Carnegie to spend his $2,000,000 in 
getting a clearer, more important idea for himself, for others — 
of what peace is before he spends two huge thoughtless million 
dollars on it. 

No investment in anything but in vision, in seeing straight, 
is really going to get Mr. Carnegie his money's worth. 

If Mr. Carnegie will spend two million dollars on a vision — 
on seeing straight about peace— the vision will do all the hard 
work— do it without trying, the way tides and springs do, and 
do it for nothing. In the meanwhile, until this is done, I cannot 
help feelmg that Mr. Carnegie's expensive yearning for peace. 
Ins lifting and straining, while it may attract much anxious atten- 
tion and keep very many important people— cardinals and 
bishops and clergymen— very busy and very tired running to 
him and tending him, and doing all they can to help him, will 
not come to much. 

It does not seem to me Mr. Carnegie can do anything very 

50 



MR. CARNEGIE AND THE PEOPLE 51 

efficient about world-peace until he gets his own peace attended 
to. Did he make this money he is spending on getting other 
people to be peaceful, out of being peaceful himself.^ This is 
what troubles me. Possibly the reason that Mr. Carnegie 
does not get on faster and has had such a setback in his world- 
peace work, is that people think the movement as he has 
conducted it is too preachified. If Mr. Carnegie could spend 
his $2,000,000 in saying very loudly to a world, "Be peaceful 
the way I have been peaceful," people would notice him more. 
The trouble Mr. Carnegie has with peace is that he has not 
taken it personally. If he had made his fortune out of being 
at peace with his workmen, the way some of our later million- 
aires are making theirs, everybody, when he spoke up about 
peace, would listen. Mr. Carnegie has made his fundamental 
mistake in supposing that peace is a subject that can only be 
bellowed about in a loud, hollow, international tone. 

The moment people stop thinking of peace as a huge, vague 
international subject, and take it deeply and seriously as a per- 
sonal one, nations will begin to have peace. 

If I had Mr. Carnegie's two million dollars I would take my 
pick of say ten industries, find one single firm in each of the 
ten that was daily using peace as a business energy. Then I 
would spend the money in having everybody else in the industry 
know how it works until they improve or adopt it. 

When Mr. Carnegie has established some peace in each com- 
munity in America to which members of the peace society can 
point, and to which they can appeal, he will get a hundred 
million dollars' worth of peace where now he gets one. 

If I were Mr. Carnegie and wanted to make one great stroke 
at war in the world before I died, I would spend instead of three 
million dollars on a peace palace, three million dollars having 
every employer of labour and every labourer know all there is 
to know about Henry Ford's factory in Detroit. I would have 
one Ford for every industry with a new invention in it in the 
United States. 



52 WE 

People would be going to a peace school eight hours a day. 
They would be being paid by their employers five dollars a day 
up, to learn what peace is. 

The main thing they would learn about peace at first would 
be rather homely, of course. They would learn that at bottom 
peace is team-work, that when a man is waked up peace really 
becomes in him a kind of hunger, carried to its logical conclusion 
of getting everybody to help him out and complete him. Peace 
in a man is a demand in him for exchange with others. Every 
workman understands about demand. Demand is what causes 
supply and gives him a job. If one takes two countries and if 
in one country one sees thirty per cent, of the people wanting to 
exchange other people's things for theirs, and in the other coun- 
try one sees ninety per cent, of the people wanting to exchange 
other people's things for theirs, every workman knows which 
country will make more money. The same holds good in swap- 
ping between capital and labour. 

Peace is going to be seen by every employer and every em- 
ployee as he sees it in his business. He will see Peace as De- 
mand. Peace between people consists in having enough self-in- 
terest to discover mutual interest and swap. 

If peace is what might be called a powerful or high gear of 
self-interest, a hot fusing, an electric furnace, a blending of 
everybody's desires into one desire, of course it makes money. 

Mr. Carnegie when he bones down to his job and gets people 
to see what peace is will not need to spend a cent in getting 
people to adopt it. Peace is going to adopt itself. I do not 
see why anybody should feel worried or expensive about peace. 
Spending money may hurry peace, I admit. But making money 
will hurry it more. And people who cannot make money out 
of peace are rapidly going under. 

The power to make money is. the power to serve. The law 
of peace is simply the law of the survival of the fittest to serve. 
The man who can have the brains to serve the most kinds of 
people m the most ways will thrash everybody in sight. No 



MR. CARNEGIE AND THE PEOPLE 53 

body can touch him. Nobody will let anybody touch him. 
The man who can discover and invent and expose mutual 
interests, who has a creative passion for making other interests 
play and work together, who can make all classes work as one 
class, who can make employers, workmen and consumers work as 
one man — the man who makes money by raising wages, who 
gets rich by lowering prices, becomes terrible and implacable 
in this world. He withers all who oppose him. Only a man 
who is more peaceful than he is can hope to compete with him. 

Christ's statement is a very literal one, that the meek shall 
inherit the earth, if by the meek we mean people who stop fight- 
ing people and listen, find out what they want, do it for them 
and become a part of them. 

This habit, this business-genius of mutual self-expression, 
this insatiable greediness for team-work, for living in others and 
through others and of having others live in us and through us — 
this passion of heaping up all men's lives upon our lives — this 
is the spirit that is making all men who have it to-day the mas- 
ters of the fate of the world. It is this spirit that, before our 
eyes, is taking possession of America. 

To bring peace to pass among other nations, Mr. Carnegie 
has but to help America express this spirit at home. 

Then everything America does will express peace. We will 
not need to mention peace. Nations who know us will know 
what peace is. We shall have expressed peace, without being 
superior, without giving good advice, without saying a word, 
and without a palace to express it in. America will be its own 
palace. And the palace will begin (as Mr. Carnegie has over- 
looked) in a cottage. 

The palace will begin in a factory perhaps, or in steel works. 
I think, myself, Mr. Carnegie would do better to go back and 
try steel works. It would be a shorter cut to Peace. The 
Hague Palace is a little superficial — a little hurried. 



THE HAGUE PALACE AND YOU AND ME 

A, large proportion of the bewilderment people feel with 
regard to this war, I think, has come to us from looking at it 
in too big figures and from not reducing things to lower terms. 
I want to clear the ground once more if I may for ourselves, so 
that my reader and I can get down to primary causes, and see 
what the real difficulty is that Mr. Carnegie in fighting for 
peace has to meet in human nature, especially the human nature 
we know the most about — in ourselves. 

I have already hinted that, as it seems to me, the scientific 
way for Mr. Carnegie to get the attention of nations to peace 
would be for him to take modestly a few specimen people in 
each nation and get theirs. Then he could work up. K Mi. 
Carnegie would take say one man in each nation who is ob- 
durate on the subject, and set six or eight carefully chosen 
specialists in human nature to work on this man, have them 
determine definitely (as any bacteriologist would) just what is 
the matter with him, what he thinks and why he thinks it, 
what he assumes and why he assumes it, and if the entire 
Carnegie Foundation would then pull itself together for this 
one man, would lift up the entire Hague Palace and set it down 
over this one man, over this one man's life, like a hothouse or 
like some noble incubator, and would then hold it there over 
him until the spirit or yolk in him really got to work, until 
the man's true nature began to stir, began to break out, began 
to peck through at last into its real self, and the peace that is 
in him, that is m every man, got out— Mr. Carnegie would 
then have something to go by, something that he really knew 

54 



THE HAGUE PALACE AND YOU AND ME ^o 

would work in hatching out peace in nations. The problem 
can only be solved in the way all scientists solve things, by 
taking one particular human being, a sample of twenty million, 
and doing him off completely. Every human being is a sample 
of twenty million more, and the way to get the twenty million 
is to get one and to know how one got him. Then the rest can 
be done as it were by machinery; that is — by doing the same 
thing over and over to the people that one did to the first 
sample. 

Mr. Carnegie apparently has not thought of this. It is be- 
cause he has tried to do whole nations, has insisted on doing 
world-wide swoops of people before he has ever really finished 
doing one, that he is having such hard work of it. I have al- 
ready suggested that he might have begun with himself. But 
that is not important. I do not insist on that. He might 
begin with me or with you; the idea is that he must begin with 
somebody, with some one person. 

The only way to be deep or to be thorough in a world-matter 
like international peace is to be personal. 

So I am trying my hand for the next chapter or so on how a 
few human beings really feel about this war. 

Something is happening to us and to our minds and our 
philosophy every day as the war drags on. What is now hap- 
pening to me, to all of us, to you, gentle reader, is a part of 
the situation that Mr. Carnegie has to meet. 



VI 
TAKING THE WAR PERSONALLY 

Mr. Bryan made a remark one day about three months along 
in the war that the thing for Americans to do was not to diagnose 
the war and find out how such a thing could ever happen to 
Europe, but to help Europe — see what we could do to help 
Europe. 

This sounded rather well for a moment. Then I began to 
think. 

If Mr. Bryan came along and found a man in a dead faint on 
Broadway, what would he say to the people standing by.f^ 
*'Now the thing for you to do, dear people," he would say, 
"is not to try to see why this man fell in this way — whether 
it is his heart or his stomach that is doing all this to him, whether 
it is his stomach that has stopped his heart or his heart that has 
stopped his stomach, or whether it comes or does not come from 
a broken leg. See what you can do to help him ! " 

Of course the only man who could really help would be the 
particular man standing by who (according to Mr. Bryan) 
would be loafing around in his mind to find out where the cause 
that would have to be removed, and that was doing all this to 
him, was located, whether it was a leg or a lung, a stomach or 
a clot on his brain. 



Every man has his choice of two ways of diagnosing the war. 

One way is to set to work twenty-four hours a day and read 
all that everybody writes, all the different coloured papers- 
know all that everybody knows in each nation, and know be- 

fi6 



TAKING THE WAR PERSONALLY 57 

sides everything everybody in each nation is trying to keep one 
from knowing, and then come to one's conclusion as to what 
the cause is, and proceed to help remove it. 

The other way is to search one's own heart and judge from 
one's own experience with one's self and with others just where 
the cause of the fighting lies, and then proceed to see — still judg- 
ing from that vast world-field in miniature in one's own heart — 
just what it is that works best in removing the cause of fighting. 

I have tried both of these ways. I have decided that the 
first way is one which I could use best about fifty years after I 
am dead, and that the second way is one which I am in a position 
to use and use with a fair degree of accuracy now. 

One of the reasons our books about the war are so unsatisfying 
is that they deal with facts that are not yet to be had. 

Most people in writing about the war leave out themselves. 
They treat the subject as an English, German, French and 
Russian subject. Nearly everything they say is about England, 
Germany, Russia and France, Servia, Turkey and Japan. 
They treat the subject as a vast, limitless prairie of the third 
person and write in a far-off, vague, third-person tone about cen- 
sored points and about censored people. They write in a vac- 
uum of things they cannot know. They take up the nations 
one after the other, these invisible, imponderable masses we call 
nations, inconceivable, immeasurable, these vast blurs of men 
and women, and seem to hope or think that by flickering these 
huge national blurs before people's eyes and by putting spoonfuls 
of what they know or any man can know about them into 
people's mouths, people can be got to see truth. 

It has seemed to me the only chance we could have to be 
thorough would be to begin with the elements in the situation 
that we know now and can know now. I have turned the whole 
method around. This book is not about England and Germany, 
France and Russia, and their war. It is about human nature 
and war and how it can stop war, about you and me, and about 
the man next door, and about what England and Germany and 



58 WE 

France and Russia with their war are doing to us, and about 
what we will let them do to us. The only way in which we 
can be deep or thorough about this war is to be deep or thorough 
about what it is doing to us. 

It is as if this whole war had been put into an envelope and 
addressed personally to you and to me— to every man of us. 
And we have got to answer it. 



If each man in America will protect and possess and master his 
soul w^hile this war is going on, it is very likely his soul will be 
of some use to him and to his fellow-citizens in trying to help his 
own nation now, and after the war is over help the others. It is 
one thing we can do for eleven nations. 

When I think of this, of all the innumerable, unascertainable 
facts about Russia, Germany, England, I do not need to know, 
in order to get down to the cause and prevention of war; when I 
think that the issue of war or peace for a world turns on what is 
in my own heart and mind, in the hearts and minds of particular 
men about me — men I know and that can know me; when I 
think that I am seeing the whole human race in miniature in the 
thoughts of the men about me and in the tides of fear and of 
hope mounting and sinking daily in my own life, there is a kind 
of paralysis falls away from me — of needing to be infinite to 
understand, of needing to be eternal to know, of needing to know 
everything in censored Germany, in censored Russia, a God 
could know, before I know how to pray or how to sing, or know 
what to do, or know w^here to begin to help. I return to my 
theme in a new spirit. I have cast the world off, I have reduced 
the imponderable world to its simplest terms, I will face Russia, 
Germany, and England, in my own heart. 

What are the main things that are happening to me personally, 
as a fellow human being, in this war? 



VII 
TAKING THE WAR NATIONALLY 

I returned home yesterday from a kind of peace tour in the 
Middle West. 

I had seen in three weeks more hons and lambs lying 
down together, more ex-strikers and capitalists looking each 
other in the eyes, than I had ever dreamed of except in what 
were supposed to be the wildest moments of "Inspired Million- 
aires." 

Naturally feeling a little warmed up about human nature and 
feeling a little religious about it, and as if I would like to go in 
and stand up with crowds of people and help sing Te Deums, I 
thought I would go to church. 

I had reached home at the wrong time to go to church in the 
regular way, and the nearest and quickest thing to do was to 
drop into the college vesper service at five o'clock. 

Then I heard a man with a vast pipe organ up behind him 
(which could hardly have held itself in from singing Magnificats 
if it tried) and a hundred glowing college girls backing him up on 
the platform and all breaking out and singing, "Jerusalem the 
Golden!" — I heard this man get up and tell seventeen hundred 
young women, the assembled mass of whose joyous faces in front 
of one sometimes seem like some great window lighting up the 
place (some of the light comes in through the windows on the 
sides but a great deal larger part and certainly the more impor- 
tant part of the lighting arrangement of Smith College comes 
from the audience) — I heard this man tell these seventeen hun- 
dred young women — all of them shining back at him — that 
human nature was full of darkness, that Man was a brute, that 

59 



60 WE 

no one could begin to express the stupendous, infinite, immeas- 
urable brutality of the human heart. 

Then he pointed to the European war to prove it. 

He told us all to be on our guard. We could not tell any min- 
ute when the beast in us would break out and sweep all fairness 
and beauty out of our lives and out of the lives of all around us. 

Of course nobody could say anything. The young women 
sang the hymn they were told to, "My Soul, Be on Thy Guard." 
Then they poured out and filled the streets wath voices, with joy 
and soft laughter and footsteps, with the stir and with the pass- 
ing of youth and hope, with the breath of life, with that sense we 
all know in the streets here of strange, contagious, gentle, un- 
spoken expectation! 



The streets were right, I think, last Sunday night after the 
service. 

One could not but feel it as one walked through the hum under 
the great trees — that glorious contradiction that glimmered and 
flowed through the streets and uplifted the streets — of what 
everybody had just heard in church. 

Often in this way have I heard or thought I heard streets talk- 
ing back to churches. 

The streets have the last word. And the factories. And 
parlours and living-rooms and kitchens and nurseries have the 
last word. 

I had a conversation with the speaker immediately afterward 
about what he had said and about what the streets were saying, 
as we walked down through the streets to his train. He was a 
man of power and vision, or at least almost always was, as it had 
seemed to me, and his religion in any ordinary crisis or when it 
had not just been floored by eleven nations, had always seemed 
to me to be full of inspiration, of deep, honest, and constructive 
thought. But with the whole continent of Europe over there 
just across the sea spending a million dollars an hour in proving 



TAKING THE WAR NATIONALLY 61 

all during the last week that men were brutes, all he could do 
when Sunday came, as it seemed to him, was to get up in his 
place and say he believed it. 

He took Europe's word for it. He did not see how he could 
talk back to eleven nations. 

On the way down to the train I said that I thought talking 
back to the eleven nations was just what America was for, and 
that talking back to the eleven nations quietly and keeping 
our heads and not believing all that we heard was the one 
great national, characteristic, responsible and practical way that 
we could help in this war. 

I admitted (how could I help admitting? Any dog going by 
in Europe could see it, or any robin up in any tree) — I admitted 
thatthe fields and woods of Europe were full just now of men who 
were looking and acting like brutes. 

Panthers and lions and tigers who have merely looked at long 
rows of insipid, stupid human beings filing past their cages and 
just standing before them and staring and yammering, would 
have their eyes opened if they could get out into the woods of 
Europe and see these same human beings now. They would 
be abashed for the rest of their natural lives, at all these sudden 
hordes, these millions of new fellow brutes they would see crop- 
ping out everywhere and carrying on everywhere in ways that 
they — the panthers and lions and tigers — would instinctively 
understand. There has never been a time in the history of the 
world when tigers and panthers and lions could hope to feel as 
close to us human beings, so full of a sympathetic understanding 
of us, as they would in Europe to-day, if they could get out and 
observe things. 

But I do not believe that tigers and panthers looking on at 
the battle of the Aisne and watching it sympathetically, and 
judging the men they saw by themselves and judging them by 
the way they looked and acted for the moment, would be right. 

Nor do I believe that the Reverend George A. Gordon, of the 
Old South Church in Boston, is right in agreeing with them. 



62 WE 

Tomtom, my dog, who lies by my desk as I write, and who licks 
my hand, may be transformed in five minutes and fight me to 
the death and race down the streets with people flying for their 
lives into their houses all the way down to the post-office. Three 
hundred pale people he has chased in behind glass doors all up 
and down Main Street may stand by and watch a policeman 

shoot him. 

But he will always be the same Tomtom to me. I shall 
always think of him as he really was before that little foolish 
v\immering germ got him. 

What I want to try to do is to judge my fellow human being as 
kindly as I do my dog. 

The present position, what might be called almost the official 
position, of America in the world war is to see to it that there is 
one nation on the earth to-day that takes a stand for judging 
human beings as kindly as it does dogs. 

Hydrophobia is not brutality. Neither is hysteria. 

At present three hundred million men infected by an obscure 
German named Bernhardi have suddenly broken away in eleven 
nations and are running wildly up and down the great Main 
Street of the World with guns in their hands, and it seems to 
me it is a very serious, paralyzing, and helpless mistake for a 
preacher like Dr. Gordon to confess in public that three thou- 
sand miles over here in the quietness of the Old South parsonage 
he is as scared about human nature and things it can do as Bern- 
hardi is. 

Bernhardi is scared about some human nature, about the 
English, French, and Russian brands. General French, see- 
ing how Bernhardi has infected many Germans, is scared about 
German human nature. But Dr. Gordon is scared about all 
human nature everywhere. 

If America agrees with Dr. Gordon in his possibly momen- 
tary mood of last Sunday it will be as serious a disaster to 
America as Bernhardi has been to Germany and to Europe. 
The only nation that can do anything in the way of the healing 



TAKING THE ^YAR NATIONALLY 63 

of the nations when this war is over will be the nation that 
refuses to believe that it is the brutality in the hearts of our 
comrades over there that has brought this war to pass. 

America is facing to-day almost all alone the most stupen- 
dous crisis of the world. It is America that will have to deal 
with it. And if we the people of America do not have a great, 
quiet-hearted, wide-prairied, sunned- through, shrewd, faithful 
belief in human nature, if we do not have the habit as we read 
of cutting down through appearances in European human na- 
ture and of seeing down through to the real selves of our com- 
rades over there, we will not be able to help them. We will 
not have (when they appeal to us at last) the warmth or the 
gusto in us to call their real selves out and bring them together, 
America, the young mighty son of the nations, the one to be 
leaned on, the big common relative of them all, in this immense 
and solemn hour of the destiny of man upon the earth, shall 
have failed the world. 

It is human nature that needs to be defended to-day with 
Mr. Carnegie's money. We want Carnegie to advertise in 
America and advertise to the world what America believes about 
human nature. 

Then war will take care of itself. 



VIII 
WAR AND HUIVIAN NATURE 

I want to devote this chapter to my working theory of war 
and human nature— the one I think Mr. Carnegie will have to 
spend a few million dollars in advertising and in making people 
believe, before it will do any good for him to try to get the atten- 
tion of the nations to peace. 

A man across from me at a dinner the other night took a 
fifty-cent cigar out of his mouth and replaced it with the fol- 
lowing remark (it seemed to me a pity to take out a fifty-cent 
cigar for a thirty-cent remark, but probably he wanted to 
rescue the people at the dinner from thinking a minute or being 
still a minute and felt driven to it) : 

"Well, there's one thing about this war; it's giving us all 
a chance to see through human nature. The mask is stripped 
off from civilization. Now we know at last what men and women 
are really like. 

I suppose the remark irritated me too much, but the man 
looked so comfortable and contented with it, and I was so 
afraid he would make another, or that every man with a fifty- 
cent cigar at the table would pile in and agree with him that 
•—well, I don't remember just what I said, but the general 
idea was that the world was full of old, respectable, rubber-tired 
remarks that everybody had been running on for ten thousand 
years, and nobody could puncture them. 

This idea about civilization being a mask, for instance. 

"Scratch a gentleman and you get a savage," was Noah's 
favourite retort. When Noah had been trying in vain for 
three hours to get some poor, wild, reckless relative to come into 

64 



WAR AND HUMAN NATURE 65 

the ark, that was what he said to him. Jacob one morning 
got up from breakfast saying something horrid to Rachel and 
flinging himself out of the room, and Rachel, looking after the 
retreating form of her suave and elegant husband, said to her 
sister, "Scratch Jacob and you get Esau." 

There are some people who always assume that every time 
a man is ugly he has just smashed a hole down through into 
his real self. Everybody can see what he is. And when he is de- 
cent he is pretending. All virtues (they tell us) are put on, and 
all beautiful and harmonious things are a kind of rouge. Civili- 
zation itself for ten thousand years is a colossal affectation, 
everybody keeping guard on himself lest he should give himself 
away, and everybody spying on everybody else and keeping 
them up lest everybody should give everybody else away, and 
the bottom should drop out of the world. 

Of course the nearest thing to having the bottom drop out 
of the world is what is happening in Europe to-day. 

When a man sitting quietly and comfortably at table watch- 
ing the bottom drop out of a world turns to me pleasantly and 
says, "I told you so," and acts rested and relieved by having 
human nature look as mean and savage as he always thought 
it was, it seems to me something ought to be done or said by 
the world to this man which will make him feel lonesome and 
uncomfortable. 

How many people agree with him.^^ 

The most important thing that is getting ready to-day in 
behalf of Europe is what America thinks and is going to do 
with this man's remark. 

When this war is over, and a world has to be made once more 
painfully and slowly out of the human beings that are left, the 
older nations of the earth are going to gather around our bound- 
less, thoughtless, mighty youngster-nation and say: "What 
does America think of human nature? What kind of a next 
thousand years does America pick out for it and propose to 
get for it?" 



66 



WE 



Then they will wait and hear what we say. 

Two opposite theories of human nature are going to be laid 
before the American people. One or the other of these theories 
we are daily getting ready to vote on and adopt as our national 
faith and as our program for a world. Soon there are going 
to be but two flags, practically, in the whole world. On one 
flag will be written the strange tragic-comic saying that has 
plunged a whole continent into war because it believed it: 
"Scratch a gentleman and you get a savage." On the other 
will be inscribed in letters of light: "Wake up a savage and 
you get a gentleman ! " 

I believe that our American people are going to rally around 
this latter standard, this flag of humanity, and hold it up 
among the graver, older nations of the earth. We are going 
to proclaim it upon the air as our national religion. We are 
going to sing with it, dedicate nations to it, build skyscrapers, 
cathedrals and railroads and cities to it. 

Both of these sayings are different ways of putting the same 
idea — the idea that every man is mixed, w^oven part out of 
gentleman and part out of savage. But put it one way, and 
you have what Europe has now, a civilization that is merely 
waiting to be smashed. Put it the other way, and you have a 
civilization that is waiting to wake up. In other words, we 
turn it around: 

"Scratch a savage and you get a gentleman." 

America's peace is the fruit of the American theory of human 
nature. The war in Europe is the final, sublime, and awful 
culmination of a theory of human nature. It is not merely a 
huge gun-battle that is raging in Europe. It is a theory of 
human nature that is raging there— the Krupp theory of human 
nature— "Scratch a gentleman and you get a savage." 

All Europe has rallied to this belief. They have formed 
huge fanatical bodies of men called armies, all devoted to the 
faith that the only final, sure way to deal with people is to as- 
sume that just underneath they are savages. They have con- 



WAR AND HUMAN NATURE 67 

ceived and built the dreadnought, a kind of vast, sacrificial 
altar on water, a kind of cathedral to hate and fear and sus- 
picion of human nature, filled day and night with the worship- 
pers of a negative religious faith — the faith that Right cannot 
make Might, the faith that guns make human nature think, 
that only armour-plate can protect God. . . . Without 
Krupp what is to become of poor helpless God? 



Last week two cold, dead soldiers — a German and a French- 
man^were found lying in a long death grapple under the night 
sk}'. For many hours they had been b'ing there together like 
two strange statues of their own hate — effigies of their own 
fear and despair about themselves and about one another. 
Their dead fingers had to be pried away from one another's 
throats. Let no man tell me these men were being themselves 
when they died. They died crazed with the lie they had been 
taught about human nature. 

The only people in Europe to-day who are being their real 
selves are the Red Cross people. It is they who represent 
human nature. It is they who are the delegates to-day from 
all human nature, appointed by all of us to rejjresent mankind 
on a sick and hysterical continent. 

It is a harsh and bitter thing to say of a savage that he 
would do what the gentlemen of Europe are doing now. 

San Francisco had a mere earthquake. Merely the ground 
under people's feet shook, and mere stones and iron girders 
fell on people's heads. But the people were fearless, steadfast, 
great-hearted, quiet about their souls and about one another. 
And men and women stood out above the ruins, heroic, un- 
mastered, and with a sudden strange godlikeness on them. 
Like stars in a wide heaven the men and women stood while 
the flames licked up the stones of the earth, and the skyscrapers 
rocked like poplars in a wind. Human beings looked in each 
other's eves and knew themselves, and knew God. This is 



68 WE 

what human nature is. It Is what San Francisco human nature 
is. But in San Francisco they had a mere earthquake. In 
Europe they are having a manquake. Their rehgion or theory 
of human nature — the hell-about-people which they have been 
drilled into believing for forty years, and which now millions 
of other men who did not believe it have been cheated into 
believing — has worked its way to the surface and produced its 
manquake. 

Nobody knows what human nature is, who judges it, or con- 
structs a world for it, on the way it acts during a manquake. 



IX 

MACHINERY AND WAR AND HUMAN NATURE 

Last week an anonymous man in Indiana who had been 
reading what is perhaps the most shamelessly hopeful section 
of "Crowds" ("A Democratic Theory of Human Nature") 
sat down in sheer despair and wrote me a letter containing a 
good wholesome list of the things that are the matter with 
people. The letter began with this heading : The Heart is full of 
deceitf Illness — and desperately wicked. Who can know it? I 
cut the heading of the letter off, posted it up on the lid of my 
desk where it still gazes at me while I write, and wrote this 
chapter. 



The assertion is made that war is organic, elemental, and 
eternal in human nature, and that nothing can stop war except 
making every man, woman, and child on earth carefully over. 

It seems to me true that war is not organic in human nature, 
that war is merely a language, a way men have had of getting 
the attention of others to what they think and feel and what 
they want. 

The moment that our other inventions or machines for get- 
ting people's attention to what we think and feel and what we 
want are found to work better than war, war will stop. 

What is happening in Europe to-day is not an expression of 
our civilization. It is a momentary failure of our civilization 
to express itself at all. 

We are fighting to-day because each man, for one reason or 
another, has stopped being his real self. 

69 



70 WE 

The men to-day who stand and point at one another and sa3% 
"This war represents you," are under an illusion. Nobody is 
represented by this war. Nobody is saying— not a soul in all 
the world — "This war represents me." 

What has happened perhaps is something like this. The 
human race has been accumulating, for now these fifty years, 
great hordes of machines. One set of rather humdrum-minded 
men in each nation has said, "Nations have always hated each 
other and always will. Everything is being done by machinery 
now. We must pile up hate machines and be ready. W^e do 
not hate anybody. But if anybody hates us and has machinery 
to hate us with, we must have some machines as good as theirs." 

Another set of men in each nation has gone to work and been 
busy in doing everything else except hate by machinery through 
all the world, in and out of all the nations everywhere. They 
have filled the world with mutual-interest engines and with 
love machines and exchange machines and most of us had been 
so busy with these machines we had quite forgotten the others. 

Then suddenly the hate-machine people — a comparatively 
small idle group who really had nothing else to do — worked 
themselves up into a kind of panic of fear of the hate machines 
of the other nations. Then before anybody knew, all the hate 
machines went off because they thought all the others were 
going off. 

The main fact about the twentieth century is that it is the 
first century of the world in which human nature is doing every- 
thing by machines. 

The next fact that has grown out of this is that very naturally 
human nature has not learned yet how dangerous doing every- 
thing by machinery is. It has not learned the peculiar risks that 
human nature runs, in doing things by machinery. 

The human race in this first clumsy, experimenting, fascinated 
hour of the twentieth century with its vast, speechless machines 
piled high about it, is like a Child. It has not seen until too 
late what all these huge, absent-minded machines piled high 



MACHINERY, WAR AND HUMAN NATURE 71 

around it in this way — unless it was very careful — would be al- 
most sure to do to it. 

Now they have done it, and this war instead of being the final 
great show-down of what human nature really is, is the first 
brutal, bottomless frankness of machines toward the human 
heart. The sins and absurdities these machines are making us 
go through the motions of to-day are not ours. We have been 
careless and have got caught in our ma'chines. We had had a 
little warning. Our education machines had already caught us. 
We had already begun to rebel against what they were doing to 
us. Our industrial machines had caught us and we had already 
begun to bring them to terms, too — make them represent us 
better. Now our war machines have caught us. That is all. 

We are all the same people — precisely the same human beings 
(only better) we were two years ago before we had dreamed, 
most of us, that such things as these we are doing every day 
before each other's eyes, would ever be done again. 

We are merely facing a new experience of human nature. 
The next intelligent thing for us to do is going to be based on this 
experience. The experience is this, to put it in one sentence. 

If the bottom cause of war is that human nature is something 
that no man or no nation can be safe with except with guns, I 
am not in favour of Mr. Carnegie's spending any money on 
peace at all. 

On the other hand, if the bottom cause of war is that people 
believe the lie that human nature is as hateful as its hate ma- 
chines make it look, the lie can be advertised and disproved and 
war can be stopped. 

If Mr. Carnegie is going to spend a million dollars in adver- 
tising a practical working theory of human nature, the more 
alive the theory of human nature he chooses to advertise is, the 
more it interests people anyway, the less it will cost Mr. Carnegie 
(once he gets it started) to get people to believe it and make 
it work. 

Here is mine and it is offered to Mr. Carnegie or to any 



72 ^^ 



one 



for what it is worth: It is not human nature that is the 
cluse of war. We do not hate anybody. We have been run 
away with by our hate machines. We would a great deal rather 
express ourselves intelligently, but our gun machines and army 
machines were quicker and more ready and have got on top. 

Most of the sins and absurdities one sees in people nowadays 
in a new, untried, machine civilization, are machinemade. Every- 
thing is made by machinery to-day. Most people's sins are. 
All a man has to do to believe this is to observe himself and the 
people he knows the most about. 

Any man who will take a Sunday morning off and put down in 
a row the things that are the matter with him, will find that his 
sins divide off practically into two lists. 

He will put down in one list his original sins — those which 
are just his and which he knows all about and which he can turn 
on and off in himself personally or by hand. 

He will put down in the other list the sins that come from 
what might be called his sin factory. These sins are in the parts 
of himself that he is allowing to be made by machinery. 

Most business sins to-day are machine made. They are the 
result of a system. Making more money out of people we deal 
with than we think we ought to, or than we wish we had to, 
may be called a machine-made sin. 

Eating too much mince pie is a hand-made sin. One can turn 
it on or off one's self. There is no reason for blaming other 
people for one's eating, or rather for one's having eaten, too 
much mince pie. One got the pie one's self. One got the 
stomachache one's self, and one's got the sin. It's very simple. 

But in a machine civilization the number of sins a man can 
claim as really his — sins a man just commits inside — is getting 
smaller every year. 

At least this is my experience. I have my own neat, well-worn 
little list of hand-made sins, sins I attend to personally every 
week; but the majority of my sins I send out the way I send out 
my shirts to the laundry and have them done outside. The 



MACHINERY, WAR AND HUMAN NATURE 73 

Social System in which I hve not only thinks these sins up and 
arranges them for me, but it finishes them off, with me just 
standing in the middle of them, as ashamed of them as I can be. 

Probably what is true of me is true of other people, and when 
I go about and look on and watch all these people everywhere, 
one after the other, making a muss of the world — "It's the 
System," I think to myself. "They are not doing what they 
want to, probably." Then I do not feel so ugly. 

I think of the way I answer letters. I do not answer the letters 
that I deeply want to answer. They are postponed. I answer 
the other letters instead, because the other letters come to me in 
a machine, as it were, and are passed along and can be attended 
to in the routine with a kind of click. 

I read books also that are passed along by the book machine, 
instead of the books I want, and I make visits on a visiting 
machine — those determined by circumstances or habit — or I 
call on people who will automatically act the worst if I don't, 
instead of those I love. And, like most people, I read a news- 
paper because the very round and round motion of my planet 
dumps one in front of me every morning. Magazines — an end- 
less belt of them roll along on my mind or roll me through them 
like a collar in a laundry. The church machine, the dinner 
machine, and the being-agreeable machine all do likewise. 

In general it may be said to be true to-day that men's sins, 
their angers, their affections, their habits, ideas and even their 
wives are automatically dropped before them on an endless 
belt. A college was handed to me in this way — four years out of 
my life — and a wife would have been — forty years more — if I 
hadn't made a struggle. 

How can I make as good a struggle against the machines on 
the other points as I have on this last one? That is what I am 
studying now. So is everybody. 

I have come to two conclusions. First: I'm going to stop 
blaming people. I have quit the sheep-and-goat view of life 
forever. Wickedness cannot be divided off so neatly to-day. 



74 WE 

At least it's not for us to divide it off. A large proportion of the 
men we are all doing wrong things to, and of the men who are 
doing wrong things to us, have been caught in a huge, blind 
business machine and are being rolled along on it. This machine, 
like some huge hopper, collects a lot of sins for other people to do 
to us, and a lot of sins for us to do to them, and then — anyone 
can see it — the machine stands over us and crunches on us until 
we do them. 

The second conclusion grows out of this one. The time I 
i^.ave put in in blaming people, I'm going to put in now in seeing 
what is the matter with people's machines. 

We made the machines. We can make them over. The 
thing has been done. 

The other day in Detroit a man named Henry Ford stopped 
his machine — a huge, incredibly successful business machine, 
which he had made and which was lunging along, running 
him and everything in sight about him — and he said to the 
machine : 

"Look here! I made you! I made you to go round and 
round and to run yourself. But you are not going to run me, 
my morals, my human relations, my social ideals, what I live for 
and the way I live ! You are not going to make me like — you ! 
I'm going to take you, crash ten million dollars into the middle of 
you, crowd you, twist you, and wrench you into some shape like 
me! 

"You don't say what I mean to my men — the way you're 
running now. I've got my own attention to myself and can 
make my business express myself, and now I'm going to make 
you over and keep you being made over every day, and all day, 
until every cog, wheel, belt, and pinion in you is going to say : 
'Here is Henry Ford! Here is Henry Ford's God! Here is 
Henry Ford's mother, his dreams when he was a boy, and here in 
cogs and wheels and belts are his prayers for his children!'" 

"What kind of a world are your children going to have to live 
in.^" said liis great, dumb, helpless factory, with its thousand 



MACHINERY, WAR AND HUMAN NATURE 75 

windows to Henry Ford. So he is making over his factory, his 
machine of wood and iron and rules and men. 

He is not merely the inventor of a little humble, limber auto- 
mobile that can wriggle into any man's pocketbook, dance up any 
hill and squirm through any hole on earth, but he has invented 
and made over twenty-four thousand men that go with his 
automobile. He has fastened down the voluntary attention, 
got the daily use of the enthusiasm and loyalty of twenty -four 
thousand men. He has smashed into his machine and got a i 
huge, cold, hateful, indifferent twenty -four thousand man-power \ 
machine to listen like a child. He has made a machine act like 
some colossal, happy, healthy human being. 

Whatever else Mr. Henry Ford, the Detroit mechanic, may 
try to strike out into the world and do — whatever hobby he may 
take up when he stops work, becomes a philanthropist, or gets 
cornered like Mr. Carnegie into being a mere millionaire — the 
gratitude of all true workingmen in this world, rich or poor, em- 
ployers or employed, is going to go out to Henry Ford for the 
way he has proved that the attention of twenty -four thousand 
workmen could be got, and for the way he has proved once for all 
that from the point of view of sheer business efficiency peace 
between employers and employed was the only thing that could 
really be made to work. 

Mr. Ford did not do this by yearning. He had the technique. 
The first thing he arranged for was to do something that would 
make his workmen look. 

As making people look is what all of the rest of us in a machine 
civilization have got to learn to do if we really get anything done, 
I would like to consider its bearing on what Mr. Carnegie is 
trying to do for peace. 



X 

LYDDITE 

I have tried to say in the last chapter that the present ma- 
chines we are using to express nations with do not express 
in the sUghtest degree what the nations are really like. It is not 
the people in the nations that have got to be made over before 
we can hope to get rid of war. It is the people's machines. The 
real war in Europe to-day is not against the people of the nations. 
It is against the machines that the people are using and that 
they are supposed to look as if they w^anted to use. All the 
nations have simultaneously made up their minds that any peo- 
ple or nation that will deliberately use machines like this to 
express themselves with must be wiped off the face of the earth. 

The nations are not trying to annihilate each other or to 
express their hatred of each other. They are trying to annihi- 
late each other's machines. 

Each nation recognizes the fact that it has outgrown using 
its hate machine itself. But it thinks the others have not out- 
grown theirs. England thinks that Germany is expressing itself 
beautifully. Germany thinks that England at last is being her 
real self. 

England is saying, "We will annihilate Germany's hate ma- 
chine. Then it will be safe to throw away ours." 

Entirely aside from the merits of the case, and the facts and 
the illusions involved, one thing stands out in this present war 
to any fair-minded observer of human nature— namely, it is not 
the men in the different nations that have got to be changed. 
We would have to take several thousand years to do that. It is 
the machines the men have for expressing themselves, which the 

7^ 



LYDDITE 77 

men have had to fall back on. It is the clumsy and bygone 
machines with which the men are trying to express themselves. 
The machines can be changed in a few years. 



When one comes to consider practical ways of changing the 
machines, one comes up sharply against two kinds of people and 
two theories of human nature and machines. 

One way to do is to assume that all that is necessary is to 
get the attention of men to how these machines do not ex- 
press them and quietly make them over and remodel them into 
machines that do. The other way to do is to assume that the 
attention of people cannot be got. If a locomotive cannot 
make a train go very well, put on three that cannot make it 
go very well. This has been what Europe has been doing for 
fifty years. The nations have recognized that their war ma- 
chines were stupid machines for expressing them. All that 
they have thought they could do was to make the war machines 
bigger and have more of them. The men who happen to be 
in charge of the governments and of nations and who determine 
such things have not very much courage about human nature 
apparently and do not believe that the attention of human 
nature can be got. 

Some of us believe that if these men understood their fellow 
human beings and had studied the art of getting their atten- 
tion, they would have got it by this time, and would have in- 
stalled machines that can express it or begin to express it. 

We are now at the fork of the roads. Civilization has 
stopped to think. Is it going to be possible to get the attention 
of men about us and our own attention to the machines of 
defense we want? Are we going to get each other's attention, 
take our machines of defense — our dreadnoughts — the ones 
we have now, and make them over until they are like us? 
Or are we going to let our dreadnoughts make us over until 
we are like them? Each man must decide for himself what 



78 WE 

he believes for himself. Are we going to believe that it is 
going to be possible to get the attention of men about us and 
our own attention to the machines of defense that we want and 
that really express us? Or are we going to believe that human 
attention in a machine age, with all these machines come out 
against us, cannot be had? Civilization is getting ready now — 
with every man of us to help — to take its choice. The issue 
is drawn sharply. Shall we plan after this to take our ma- 
chines of defense, our dreadnoughts, and make them over 
until they are like us? Or shall we plan to give up and to let 
our dreadnoughts keep making us over until we are like them ? 

We have been getting like them very rapidly during the war. 
Do we like it? The way we decide this question turns on which 
we believe in more — dreadnoughts or advertising; on which ex- 
plosive we believe works best — lyddite or attention. I would 
like to consider this in the next chapter. 



THE ART OF MAKING PEOPLE LOOK 

While I was waiting for a train the other day I fell to think- 
ing about dreadnoughts, as I do nearly every day lately. It 
was in a small station on a great railway not far from New; York, 
and as I stood and thought of the dreadnoughts I watched 
express after express go through — long trains of those stolid, 
riveted, frightened-looking steel cars, those rolling fortresses 
we human beings try to lock ourselves away from death in. 
I fell to thinking of them as I looked — car after car riveted 
together in despair about human nature, riveted together in 
fear of labour, every car accusing or seeming to accuse every 
employee on the road, giving up on him, taking it for granted 
any minute he would murder, hundreds of men at a stroke, by 
not paying attention to his work. 

It is like a terrible pageant — like a little terrific short play 
—a dramatic summing up of our theory of modern life just 
to see an American railway train go by. This very minute 
while I work I can see, or think I see hundreds of them across 
the continent going up and down the land roaring at everybody 
in the country and in the cities about how we have given up on 
each other in America and how discouraged we are about labour, 
about getting people to pay attention to their work. Hun- 
dreds of trains this very minute are being loaded up and swung 
along by superintendents and foremen and owners who are 
discouraged about getting railway employees to pay attention 
to their work. It is the passengers in the trains, all sitting on 
the edges of their seats holding on, who are paying attention 
now. Armed to the teeth in steel plate — poor creatures! — one 

79 



80 WE 

sees them being shot through from Chicago to Denver, fron, 
Boston to New York, all day, every day, and at night sometimes 
when I wake up and hear a train outside in the dark, I think of 
it_of this vision of the trains of America, the sleepy roar, the 
long yellow gleams through the fields — all those poor men and 
women inside — thousands of them lying headfirst in those 
long steel tubes, those helpless pipes of people, thundering 
through darkness! 

Sitting up in one's berth, or holding on to the edge of one's 
seat, is not a practical way or forcible way of having attention 
paid to the problem of railway safety. It would be cheaper 
and more practical to have the attention that is being paid to 
safety, paid by the men at the throttle and in the signal boxes. 

The steel cars do not make the men in the signal boxes pay 
attention. They merely make them feel their attention is less 
necessary or they roar at them that nobody expects them to 
pay attention, anyway. Long, black, flying lines of people go 
by the men all day, all night, telling them they have given up 
expecting anything of them. 

When one thinks of it, the problem of American railway 
safety narrows down at last to a problem of statement, to a 
problem of literature if you please, or of advertising — a problem 
of hiring a man who is a genius at arresting the attention of 
men and holding it, a genius at touching the imagination of 
men and getting them to apply it to their work— a man who is a 
genius at selecting and placing practical psychologists and 
attention— experts in the railroads' employ to work out enthu- 
siasm for employees in their work. 

I thought of this the other night as I stood in the country 
station and watched those cars go thundering by like rows of 
cannon all aimed at death, all lowering at some poor tired 
fellow human being in a signal box, saying, "You shall not, you 
shall not kill us!" The people in the cars seem to say, "With 
a click of a lever in your box, in a minute of absentmindedness, 
If you hurl us up against death, here are a thousand rivets 



THE ART OF MAKING PEOPLE LOOK 81 

hundreds of men in a mighty din have pounded together into 
these great steel safes for us to thunder through death with!" 

The problem of railway safety is at bottom a problem of 
psychology, an expert problem of attracting and holding atten- 
tion. K the same amount of money railroads are spending in 
rebuilding all their bridges and relaying all their tracks for 
these huge, stupid, pessimistic, cowardly, fool-proof cars were 
spent in organizing the attention of railway labour, in getting 
at the source of its inattention, its weariness and sleepiness, and 
in touching its imagination about its work, and in making it 
work with spontaneity and joy, it would soon become unneces- 
sary for a railway in transporting a poor scared human being 
across New England to lift up and hurl along with him (for 
each hundred and fifty pound human being) another extra 
twenty-five hundred pounds of gun-metal — all for two cents a 
mile — for him to keep from dying in. 

The ordinary coach on our railroads carries twenty-five 
hundred pounds of steel per passenger, the Pullman eleven thou- 
sand pounds, and the compartment sleeper seventeen thousand 
pounds. 

When I go to New York from Northampton, a ticket costs 
me, including a seat in the parlour car, $4.13. I get three 
things for this $4.13: transportation for Gerald Stanley Lee, 
transportation for my twenty pounds of suitcase and trans- 
portation for the eleven thousand pounds of armour-plate we 
have had to have wrapped around us to protect us. All this 
has to be hauled with me if I am going. As I figure it, I 
pay five and a third cents for Gerald Stanley Lee, and four 
dollars eight and two thirds cents for the dead weight of the 
fear and despair and helplessness of the New York, New Haven 
& Hartford Railroad. 

It seems to me that five and a third cents for transporting 
me is too little, and that four dollars and eight and two thirds 
cents paid out for the despair and helplessness of the New York, 
New Haven & Hartford Railroad is too much. 



82 WE 

I feel the same way about my Government— about the tax 
I pay into my Government— that I do about this ticket on the 
New York & New Haven Road. Four fifths of all I pay into 
the Government goes into paying the expenses of my Govern- 
ment's fear and despair and helplessness about itself— about its 
ability to express itself to other nations. 

The Government spends four hundred millions a year in 
running an army and navy, and a hundred and ten on itself and 
on running itself. 

The United States is so afraid that it has not the brains 
to make other nations understand it and give proper attention 
to it, that out of every five hundred million dollars it spends a 
year, it spends a hundred and ten million dollars on itself — 
i. e., on the citizens of this country, and it spends four hundred 
million dollars a year on showing how afraid it is of the citizens 
of other countries. 

There are two modest items in my life I want to change 
before I die. First, I want to use any influence I may have 
with the New Haven Road to get them to let me pay more than 
five and a third cents for being transported from Northampton 
to New York. I can afford to pay more than five and a third 
cents for being transported from Northampton to New York, 
but I cannot and will not, any longer than I can help, be obliged 
every time I want to see the front of the Belmont Hotel, to pay 
a bill to the New Haven Road for four dollars and eight cents' 
worth of fear and despair and helplessness about itself. 

I want to try to convince the New Haven Road that the 
most economical thing it can do is to get rid of this expensive 
despair it has about itself first. A despairing road — a road 
that cannot even express itself to its own employees— three or 
four thousand people, is naturally in despair about expressing 
itself to banks and to the millions of people who have to live on it. 
It should concentrate on its smallest despair first. Second, I 
want to persuade our Government that the next thing our Gov^ 
ernment needs to do is to learn to get the attention of the citi- 



THE ART OF MAKING PEOPLE LOOK 83 

zens of other nations so that it will not need to spend four million 
dollars a year on a great shooting machine that will make us feel 
safe whether we know enough to get their attention or not. 

I believe the time is at hand when the New Haven Road, 
instead of giving up on its employees and supplying people 
desperately with steel cars, is going to get the attention of its 
employees so thoroughly and to the point that no one will 
bother to notice when he is travelling on the New Haven Road 
whether he is in a steel car or not. It is a specific problem in 
psychology to be worked out like any other scientific problem. 
The New Haven Road will soon be seen setting up beside its 
huge roundhouses, psychological laboratories, brain-factories, 
and huge attention-works for engineers. It is not going to cost 
very many parlour cars a year or steel bridges or new locomotives 
for the New Haven Road to pick over the entire United States 
to get its engineers — men with a mental genius for never having 
a flaw in their attention for two and four hour runs. When 
these men were secured — these men with' a special gift of saving 
lives, the road will then proceed to treat these men as bees 
treat queen bees, as if attention were a kind of railroad radium 
— treat them with reference to their not being wasted. 

Then having won out as an efficient organization, having 
got down to business, having got the attention of its own em- 
ployees, it would be in a position to make banks listen to it, 
legislatures respectful to it, and the public proud of it. 

In the same way that the New Haven Road will soon be 
spending its money in picking out experts and on getting the 
attention of engineers, I believe that the United States Govern- 
ment will soon be seen picking out and training experts in get- 
ting the attention of other nations and touching the imagination 
of all peoples to what America is like, and what America is ar- 
ranging to be like. 

This is where Mr. Carnegie could help. He could start 
doing what the Government would do when it saw how Mr. 
Carnegie had made it work. 



XII 
THE ART OF MAKING NATIONS LOOK 

We see twelve million men camped out opposite each other, 
six million men tucked away in holes in the ground on one side, 
and shooting at six million men tucked away in holes in the 
ground on the other side. 

Their minds about one another are tucked away in holes in 
the ground, too. 

If Germany would keep on paying the board-bills of these 
same six million men, while they dropped their guns and went 
over and played quoits and talked with the six million men on 
the other side, and if she should then send back these six million 
Frenchmen and Englishmen — men who had come to know six 
million Germans face to face — and should scatter around all 
through France and England six million new friends of Germany 
— Germany would come nearer to getting what she wants and 
needs and has a right to, out of France and England and Belgium 
tlian she ever will now. 

It would have paid Germany and Austria and England and 
France, before the war came on, to get together twelve million 
men for a vast international sociable. All it would have cost 
would have been board-bills— which they have to pay now while 
killing each other— and the board-bills could have been paid two 
or three times over for what is now spent on guns, ships, forts, 
explosives, widows' pensions, and wooden legs, and fear and 
hate. 

All tliese men have to do is to get each other's attention, and 
the causes of the war, the mutual hate and fear of the nation* 
Item for item, man for man, man by man, would be removed. 

84 



THE ART OF MAKING NATIONS LOOK 85 

The same thing done on paper or with moving pictures — every- 
body staying at home — a milUon dollars a day on moving pic- 
tures, or, say, a million dollars a day on handbills, pamphlets, or a 
million dollars a day on doing things together — would be more 
practical. Six million Germans all alongside, trying to help six 
million French and English sow these fields they are planting 
each other's dead bodies in, with wheat, oats, and potatoes, 
would soon learn incidentally, while they worked and talked, 
that half these things that make Germany and England want to 
fight are lies and hysterics, and that the other half, when the lies 
and hysterics are over, would voluntarily be removed. 

If the twelve million troops would get together, con:e along- 
side, and move a mountain over a mile, and then move it back, 
it would be practical and impressive compared to what they are 
doing now. They would get each other's attention. They 
would have to move the mountain well and do team-work to- 
gether well. If they felt that moving a mountain over and 
moving it back looked more foolish than killing five thousand 
men a day, and were ashamed, they could build motor roads and 
dykes together until they looked each other in the eyes like men, 
or they could kill potato-bugs, beetles, gypsy moths, San Jose 
scale or move sewers out of rivers. 

Or if they all massed — six million men on one side and six 
million on the other side — in helmets and flashing bayonets, and 
stood there over against each other and twirled their thumbs, it 
would be more practical and more impressive than what tl.ey are 
doing now. Six million men standing up and twirling their 
thumbs at one another would at least soon be getting in time 
together — getting each other's attention — would soon be doing 
the same tune with their thumbs. Then they could go on to 
more important things together. There is hardly anything that 
these men could do together, if they really did it well, that 
would not count on the main point more, would not get their 
attention to one another more than what they are doing now 
in rolling about their great guns, in spending a million dollars a 



86 WE 

day in shooting their despair and helplessness about their brains 
at one another. 

Peace is purely a problem in getting men to respect themselves 
enough and to trust to their own brains enough to know that they 
can get attention, and to see how everything else they want can 
be got when they get it. What we face is not an intricate prob- 
lem in how these human beings on both sides are alike, or how 
they are not alike, but a problem in getting them to notice each 
other. 

So it is not a general staff problem, but a problem in psy- 
chology and advertising that Germany and England and the 
world are up against — a huge engineering project in mutual at- 
tention. 

As has been remarked before, blowing a man's attention up 
does not get it. Even if the gun hits him it merely scatters his 
attention about. If it does not hit him, it merely makes his 
attention so angry and helpless that it will take many years 
probably all the rest of his life, to begin to begin to get it. 



XIII 
THE ART OF ADVERTISING PEACE 

There are two ways to do when we are face to face with a 
great problem in getting the attention of people. One way to 
do is to give the problem up, assume that their attention cannot 
be got, and make elaborate and expensive mechanical arrange- 
ments for getting on with them whether their attention is got 
or not. 

The other way to do, instead of spending our money in arrang- 
ing elaborate and expensive machines for getting along without 
getting their attention, is to spend our money on getting it. 

Nations that think they cannot get the attention of other 
nations spend half their income on dreadnoughts and armies, so 
that they will not have to care whether they can make anybody 
understand what they are like, or really notice them or not. 

Capitalists who cannot express themselves to their workmen 
so that they understand them, organize expensive bullying ar- 
rangements and lockouts for keeping workmen scared or out of 
work. Labour unions organize expensive arrangements for keep- 
ing employers scared, and throwing them out of business. 

Of course, if one has given up one's own brains and has backed 
down on one's own powers in getting the attention and stimu- 
lating the understanding of others, the best one can do is to fix 
up arrangements for living intimately and yet safely with people 
whether they have any brains or not. 

It is on this principle that nations have invented steel guns. 

There is nothing peculiar to the Europeans in the fact that as 
a substitute for getting each other's attention and for making 
each other's brains work — they are pointing at one another steel 

87 



88 WE 

guns. We cannot saj^ anything in America. Our whole Ameri- 
can civiUzation is honeycombed by the scientifically sophomoric 
idea, the machine-age illusion that installing expensive and 
elaborate machinery for getting along without brains in people 
is cheaper than installing brains in people. By brains in people 
I mean their power to use words and actions which make them 
understand others and make others understand them — their 
powers of mutual attention. 

Our modern civilization is lunging along spending nine tenths 
of its time, of its money, on one supreme last effort between the 
nations and corporations to get along without brains. We are 
spending nine tenths of our treasures and nine tenths of our 
brains on brain-saving machines — machines for not needing 
brains, on huge, sprawling, monstrous, innumerable engines 
which are supposed to take the place of a plain, sensible effort of 
people to pay a little attention to one another ! 



XIV 

THE BEST WAY TO GET THE WORLD'S ATTENTION 

TO PEACE 

I would like for a moment for the purpose of this chapter to 
recall my definition of peace. I have said that peace is not 
merely a negative thing — a pale, scared, wistful not-fighting. I 
have dealt in this book exclusively with peace as a force of na- 
ture — as an energy. Peace is an energy of mutual attention, a 
genius for pursuing and overtaking mutual interest. 

When I see half the men of the world and nation after nation 
falling back on armies to defend themselves, the first thing I 
think of is that they do not honestly believe in peace. The 
second is that they do not believe in it because they have not 
seen it. The third is that the way to get these men who do not 
believe in peace to believe in it is to show them some. 

The obvious thing to do is to move these men to where some 
peace is, or to move some peace to where they are. Then they 
can see for themselves. 

As it is not possible to arrange off-hand in all nations con- 
venient points where people can drop in from day to day and see 
some peace working, what is the next best thing we can do or 
begin to do, to attract the attention of the rank and file of the 
men of the world to peace? 

In a machine-ridden age which has millions of people in it 
who are being bowled helplessly along by huge, ready-made 
machines — machines which determine not only what they eat 
but what they think, which own them body and soul, machines 
which almost do their living for them — ^what is there that can 
possibly be done to break in upon these men, smash down 

89 



90 WE 

through their machines, and make them look up and listen to 

Peace? 

It is obvious that nothing can be done to all these helpless dots 
of people— these bolts and nuts of people — being passed along 
on an endless belt called civilization; it is obvious that nothing 
can be done to them by hand. 

All the knowledge that twentieth-century people have and 
all the attention that they are capable of, is being attended to 
daily by their machines. If everything else is done by machin- 
ery to-day, attention to peace must be attended to by machinery. 

This brings one face to face with the fourth point — in the art 
or rather perhaps the economics of getting the attention of people 
to peace. It is only through the machines that already have the 
attention of the people, that we can hope to reach them with new 
machines. 

What are the machines that already have the attention of the 
people.^ I have been looking about to see. 

A man only has so many hours a week to live, and every one 
of these hours in the week his attention is being attended to 
by some machine. There is always some machine for get- 
ting his attention which can be watched getting it at certain 
hours. 

With all these various machines that are after him and after 
his attention, which should peace use in trying to get the main 
chance at his mind.? 

I have been going over them. 

There is the Sunday Machine— part Church, part Sunday 
Newspaper. This machine takes its turn at him on his own day- 
off in the week. His attention is supposed to be in the grip, this 
day, of his priest or his Hearst. 

Then there is his eat-and-drink machine, which is at work 
on his attention three hours a day or so at mealtime. What 
his attention gets in this way is determined by his cook and his 
pocketbook and his stomach. 

There is his sleep machine-eight hours a day-in which what 



THE WORLD'S ATTENTION TO PEACE 91 

he thinks about is supposed to be attended to by a more or less 
irresponsible or unapproachable fairy. 

There is his play machine — an hour or so every evening — in 
which what he thinks is determined by his editor, his bartender, 
or movie-theatre. 

• And there is his work machine — eight hours a day — in which 
what he thinks and what he is in the habit of being like and what 
he has got to be like is being reeled off in front of him by his 
employer. 

Obviously of these two best and biggest eight-hour machines 
that lord it over him and that are always keeping after the man 
and after the man's life — his sleep machine and his work machine 
— the work machine, the one in which what he thinks is being 
run through him by his employer, is by far the most efficient 
and steady one for getting his attention and |or making him be- 
lieve what he believes and for making him be what he has got to 
be. The only machine big enough to get all the attention of all 
men to peace in this world is the industrial machine. It goes 
everywhere and it is going all the time, except when men sleep. 
If we put some peace into this — into the world's industrial ma- 
chine, if we set this peace to working eight hours a day on these 
men — on their bodies and on their minds — if we work peace out 
in their own lives — before their own eyes, armies and dread- 
noughts will be sloughed off almost without anybody's noticing 
it and as a matter of course. When peace as an energy has be- 
come a daily personal experience to all capable workingmen in 
^11 the most powerful factories in each industry, it will not be 
necessary to persuade them to believe in peace between nations. 

It is because so many employers all over the world are still 
using this attention machine to-day to make men believe in 
Mutual Inattention, in Mutual Fear and mutual fight, that men 
who see that they must fight to keep alive themselves think na- 
tions must fight to keep alive. 

Men who have had war dinned into them ever since they can 
remember, eight hours a day at their work — men who are organ- 



92 ' WE 

ized for mutual inattention and mutual fear in their work— are 
not going to become suddenly, the moment they get out of the 
shop, beautiful and splendid creatures talking about peace be- 
tween nations. 

Their attention machine has got them, and got them young, 
got them years and years ago, and has pinioned them in war. A 
crisis comes between nations. Millions of them with a terrible 
sincerity rush out from their fight in the mills to the fight in 
the fields. They stand up passionately to be shot. 

As I have said before, this eight hours a day attention machine 
that gets a man, that pinions him for life, has everything that is 
put into it, put there by the man's employer. 

So I have come to put the case like this: The best possible 
arrangement in this present world for getting a man's attention 
to war, for makii\g a man believe in war, is an employer who 
believes in war and who fights his labour eight hours a day and 
who makes his labour want to fight him eight hours a day. The 
best possible arrangement for getting a man's attention to peace 
is an employer who believes in peace and who uses peace, or 
mutual attention, every day as an energy in working for his 
men and getting his men to work for him — the employer who 
runs his factory as a kind of Mutual Attention Works or Mutual 
Interest Works. 

This employer I have called the inspired millionaire. 



A man has invented a way— this morning's paper tells me — of 
making two hundred times as much gasolene out of a hogshead 
of petroleum as the Standard Oil Company does. 

He is a Government official and has given the patent, with one 
beautiful noble gesture, to everybody. , \ 

He might have been an inspired millionaire. ' 

Every great invention gives the consumer, employer, and work- 
men m an mdustry a new chance. 

This man has thrown this chance away. He will help the 



THE WORLD'S ATTENTION TO PEACE 93 

consumers and he will help the rival employers — but he will not 
help the workmen one bit. The only way an inventor can help 
workmen to-day is to hold his invention as a trust for workmen, 
as well as for consumers and employers. 

When an employer in a given industry sees clearly how well 
peace could be made to work and how wasteful his own little 
personal industrial machine is because his interests and his 
workmen's interests are being run as if they were not the same, 
the first difficulty he comes up against in putting peace with his 
workmen into practice, is that he cannot do it without paying 
them higher wages. If he makes a good beginning and tries 
to pay them higher wages, his competitors step in and undersell 
him in the market and he soon has neither money nor business 
with which the higher wages can be paid. 

My forecast for world -peace is this. World-peace is going to 
be brought to pass in all nations through industrial peace, and 
industrial peace is going to be brought to pass in this world one 
industry at a time, through some one inventor in it who uses 
the freedom his invention gives him to run his business in his 
own way and to make his business machine over until it expresses 
himself. The other business machines around him which all go 
rolling on helplessly without meaning anything, which go crush- 
ing along without expressing anybody — he will defy with his 
invention. He will clear off with it a place in his business to be 
his real self. He will use his invention to pry his will to be him- 
self, his full and real self upon the world. He will make his own 
business machine over until it is like him, expresses what he 
means to himself, to his competitors, to his consumers — and his 
workmen. 

It is in this way I believe that world-peace or peace between 
nations is coming to pass. In one industry at a time, the most 
original, powerful, and inventive man in it, the man who wins 
by serving the most people the most, will be seen throwing out of 
competition all rival business machines that cannot make money 
out of peace as he does. In this way a whole industry will be 



94 WE 

won over and all the employers and all the workmen in it will 
believe in peace. 

There is hardly an industry in the world which sooner or later 
is not bound to have and have very soon some commanding 
freeing invention in it which will make it possible for men who 
know how to make peace work to smash hate machines in the 
business, wedge peace machines in and show how they work. 

In this way the world shall be won for peace, one inventor 
and one industry at a time. They will file in, in great companies 
— the industries will — each bringing its millions of men — to the 
world's march of peace. The world shall be filled with the tread, 
the awful, beautiful, resistless tread, of the feet of the men of 
peace. The feet of the men shall not be as in Scripture, beautiful 
upon the mountain- tops. Through our windows and through our 
doors we shall hear peace flocking past us in the common street. 

There are people who think that this way of advertising peace 
will be slow. 

I do not. It is not only the most universal but the most 
implacable, conclusive, swift electric advertising there is. 

The Inspired Millionaire with his inspired or elated Labour 
about him and working with him, is the World's short-cut to 
peace. 



XV 

MR. FORD AND HIS FACTORIES 

As some people may remember, my first attempt in the way of 
an advertisement of peace was made some six years ago. I 
planned out some three hundred full-page "ads," bought the 
paper, hired the best man I knew for a printer and engaged my 
stenographer for a publisher, gave to it the general heading "In- 
spired Millionaires," and launched it on the world. Then I 
waited. 

(I will skip here.) 

After a good deal of waiting a few business men who had 
managed to worm in around the literary critics, and find out 
that the book was published, began to send in replies. Inciden- 
tally they began sending the book around to one another, and 
writing to me and telling me things I ought to know. 

The general idea that in business, anyway, peace y/as an 
energy, that it would work if anybody would try it, seemed to 
be meeting with a good deal of acceptance. But they all 
wanted somebody else to try it — the way England and Russia 
and Germany did. 

I got a good deal of advice, of course. But having given a 
good deal, I had to expect it. One man thought the book was 
essentially true, but "Inspired Millionaires" was not an apt 
title. He thought "Perspired Millionaires" was more descrip- 
tive in this transition stage. Many people, of course, judging 
from the title, supposed "Inspired Millionaires" was a poem. 
Others thought it was a novel — especially after they had read it. 

Then, one day, , who was an escaped socialist and who 

was trying very hard to believe it, and who had made himself 

95 



96 WE 

famous as a kind of expert or statesman in getting public atten- 
tion to what he believed, said: "You ought to write * Inspired 
Millionaires ' over— make it a play. Put that book into a play," 
he said, " and it would sweep the country ! " He said this several 
times. Finally, when he had been abroad for a year and had 
just returned, he fell in one night with a little group of semi- 
inspired millionaires who had all read it and who all seemed to 
semi-believe it, and he thought the time had come to act. He 
brought the matter up to me again. He pressed me for an 
answer. "Why don]t you dramatize it.^" he said. 

I said it was already being dramatized. When he pressed 
me for particulars — who was doing it, and when would it be 
ready, and where would it be staged — I said that several hundred 
men were doing it. I did not know which one would get it done 
first. 



Henry Ford has got his done first. The world's the stage. 
Why take time with a play with three or four million automobiles 
in it — all taking part in it — to niggle with Klaw & Erlanger or 
with Shubert, or Sir Herbert Tree, for one of their little stages.'^ 



Notice to the Reader : At this writing, Friday, Decem- 
ber 3d, has called me up from New York, stopped 

the presses, and has come up to Mount Tom with this 
chapter to ask me, while the big machines are standing 
waiting with their mouths open down in New York, 
what I think of Henry Ford's Peace Ship. 



Note I. I have just been saying that to Henry Ford this 
world is a stage. We are presented with two plays. One is 
called "Peace at Home" by Henry Ford, and the other is called 



MR FORD AND HIS FACTORIES 97 

*' Peace Abroad" by Henry Ford. I believe the "Peace at 
Home" play is going to have a long run. 

What I am saying in this chapter is about the *' Peace at 
Home" play. 

Note II. I have many disagreements and conflicting emo- 
tions about Mr. Ford and his Peace Ship, and, when 

comes up from New York, breaks in upon my feelings about Mr. 
Ford's Peace Ship, and, standing practically at my elbow, asks 
me to take all these feelings up in a minute and tuck them into a 
footnote, a neat little cornucopia of a footnote, the reader will 
not be surprised perhaps if my feelings stick out over the edge a 
good deal. Some of them may change or drop off in time. 

Note III. I hope Mr. Ford is not going to embarrass the 
Country as much as this morning he is embarrassing me. I feel 
to-day a little as some ancient Hebrew preacher would have felt 
delivering a beautiful sermon on Samson and on what Samson 
was and what Samson could do, and then suddenly — everybody 
looking — in comes Samson with his hair cut. This has been 
my first feeling about Mr. Ford this morning. 

Note IV. Every now and then when I am listening to the 
Boston Symphony Orchestra from my seat down in the audi- 
ence, I fall to watching the trombone player. Sometimes I get 
so interested and sympathetic I forget. That wonderful, long- 
drawn-out sweetness, that long-and-short of sweetness — it 
makes me almost move my hands back and forth to listen to it. 
I feel like stepping right up to the platform and taking hold 
myself. I dream of standing up there before everybody and 
pushing the music thoughtfully, softly back and forth. . . . 

But something in me restrains me. 

My feeling about Mr. Ford is that he would step right up. He 
is less self-conscious, more simple and honest-minded than I am 
probably. 

Of course he has his own instrument — a colossal pipe organ 
he daily plays on out in Detroit, which he has played on as no 
man has ever played before. But he sees President AVilson with 



98 WE 

his trombone, and in a minute more there he is up there on the 
platform sawing the sweetness back and forth! 

Note V. As long as Mr. Ford confines himself to the instru- 
ment he knows, he is a great national force. His crowning dis- 
tinction is that he is an ordinary workingman printed in large 
letters^ a kind of inspired mechanic. He understands and can 
master as almost no one else the psychology of the men who 
carry a pail. He has achieved the honour of being a millionaire 
who in his heart still carries a pail himself. "Once a mechanic, 
always a mechanic," is Henry Ford's pride and boast. I want 
to boast of it for him. As a plain mechanic Henry Ford is doing 
one of the big nation-building, peace-founding, constructive 
feats of the world, but, when he tries to deal with peace the way 
other people do — as a statesman or as a mere millionaire or as a 
mere philanthropist would — his hair is too short. 

Mr. Ford's peace idea has made such a false start because Mr. 
Ford is neither a national nor international psychologist. The 
only way to send a shipload of peace from America to fighting 
nations would be in due time to pick out the right men to go — 
men generally accepted as representatives of the country. Mr. 
Ford undertook a psychologically impossible and contradictory 
task. To get his plan to work he would have to get the right 
three hundred men to go, and to get the right three hundred men 
to go he would have to tell them his plan, and any plan that 
was told to three hundred men would not work. Every nation 
would know of it and anybody who liked could stop it. I have 
great expectations of what Henry Ford will eventually work 
through to and do for peace, but he is an inventor — and does not 
necessarily hit his idea the first time. It seems to me he has 
hurried. 

To start a kind of jitney bus of peace around the world and 
ask anybody to pile in and everybody to say after they get in 
where they want the bus to go may uncover in this country with 
Its seven thousand obscure millionaires, the first millionaire 
America has had, who has done anything interesting enough 



MR. FORD AND HIS FACTORIES 99 

or courageous enough to be laughed at, but, while it does rest 
one to suddenly come in a dreary waste of wealth on one refresh- 
ing, childlike, innocent millionaire, and I am proud to think 
of him, I am afraid he does not help peace practically at this 
moment. 

But, of course, if Mr. Ford had tried to run his factory in 
this way, the Ford Car would never have been heard of. 

Note VI. As I write, I see ninety million people in America 
standing and looking from the shore with straining eyes at Mr. 
Ford's Peace Ship. I am asking everybody in this book to turn 
around and take one good look at his factory. 



When Mr. Ford's "Peace at Home" play was first put on — 
everybody remembers it, about two years ago — I went about 
among the audiences for weeks — anywhere — parlour cars, trol- 
leys, tables in restaurants, hotel lobbies, railway stations — seeing 
how people took it in and how it struck them. 

As what Henry Ford has done to smash into his machine, and 
make it like himself is very suggestive of much we will probably 
want to do to ours to make it like us, and as the way people 
have taken and are going to take Henry Ford's action is the 
history of how they are going to be got to believe peace works, 
I am going to go into my own first impressions, as I compared 
them from day to day, in some detail. 

The national attempt our twenty million business men in 
America made one cold January morning two years ago to see 
what Henry Ford was up to, or what he thought he was up to, 
in making as he did a kind of indiscriminate ten-million-dollar 
dump out of his employees, brought to light more interesting 
and morally spectacular things in American human nature 
than anything that has happened in America since the Civil 
War. 

As a matter of fact, it was very literally to me a kind of civil- 
war proclamation — a manifesto that the more important and 



100 ^^E 

more costly civil war my country had been in ever since I could 

remember was about to begin to cease. 

It would be hard to imagine any better device this nation 
could have had to think its way out of chronic civil war by, than 
Henry Ford's ten-million-dollar dump. 

I did not know Mr. Ford, and the first thing I discovered was 
that until I had taken a long walk around him and got a fair 
perspective on him from my point of view and of the nation, I 
did not want to. 

There was the action, anyway, as it stood. Whatever it was 
or whatever could be said about it, it was colossal, international, 
touching the world about me at a thousand points; and I found I 
would rather not drop in and sit in a mere chair by a mere win- 
dow in Mr. Ford's office, merely with Mr. Ford. This was my 
philosophy about it. 

If I happened to be by and saw a mountain throw itself into 
the sea suddenly, I would not put in my time looking at the hole 
where the mountain was, but I would watch the splash it made 
and the mighty waves it made, and consider the little waves it 
made to the furthest shore of the sea. 

It would be the only way to see what the mountain really 
amounted to. And it has seemed to me it is the same with Mr. 
Ford — with the huge blow or shock he made that January day, 
upon the labour of the world, and upon the nerves of Wall Street. 

What does it mean? I asked myself. What is going to come 
of it in a year or in twenty years? 

Mr. Ford would be the last man to go to to interpret his 
own action. Only a world could do it. Every man could help. 
The first moment I went out into the street, I found every man 
had begun. Nearly all of the help that came to Mr. Ford at 
first during those first few weeks came from men who would not 
have helped if they had known how not to. They helped back- 
ward— vociferously and eagerly— most of them, by a kind of un- 
accountably bitter criticism which made one by sheer luxury of 
recovering one's balance think hard toward Ford. Everywhere 



MR. FORD AND HIS FACTORIES 101 

I went I began having handed out to me (as everybody did) 
those large handsome heavy hunks of worldly wisdom, people 
seemed to feel they had to have ready about Mr. Ford and about 
Mr. Ford's business — (one could hardly go a block down the 
street without getting one) — those first weeks. 

There were various ways of accounting for Mr. Ford's motive. 



The first one I thought of was this. Mr. Ford got to feeling a 
little probably, as the end of the year 1914 wore on, the way the 
members of our Massachusetts Legislature do down in Boston 
during those last hours at the close of the long session when they 
throw books at one another's heads, smash furniture, and throw 
spit-balls, and dump (figuratively speaking) the State of Massa- 
chusetts off Beacon Hill into the harbour, and swing their hats 
in the chamber, and put their tired, happy feet up on their desks, 
and all say to one another and to the people : " Hooray ! Nobody 
can make us do anything the way we have to any more!" 

I rather liked to think of it in this way. After all my long 
experience in trying to warm up to millionaires it did me good. 
So I let myself go. 

Mr. Ford after a long, hard pull at "business is business" — 
a furious stretch of sleepless efficiency and of sizing everybody 
accurately up and paying everybody precisely down — had come 
to the end and knew he had come to the end, as all of us do now- 
adays, of the word "efficiency." He stood as any reasonable 
American millionaire ought to, once in so often, appalled before 
himself and bored to death by the long, slow monotone of his 
own competence. Something, he decided suddenly, would 
have to have a give in it somewhere, and so one memorable 
night — about New Year's Eve it was — when no one was looking 
he stood up over that scrupulously measured-off, tiresomely 
infallible, riotously economical factory of his, pulled out the 
bung of ten million dollars on it, and went home, flashed out the 
light over his bed, and vi^^r t to sleep in two minutes. 



102 WE 

I liked to think of it. It was just one of those things human 
nature will do, in spite of itself, once in so often. It was an out- 
break Mr. Ford was having, a kind of tear or orgy of benevo- 
lence. 

To me, with my more or less furtively hopeful ideas about 
inspired millionaires, Mr. Ford's action, however much I disap- 
prove of orgies, or even of benevolence, came as one more pleas- 
ant proof of my theory of how much more human millionaires are 
than they think they ought to look. I have always liked to feel 
in a way that I am not totally unlike a millionaire, and as long 
as I can keep from having to be one, I enjoy playing with the 
idea, and I am free to say that if I had been cooped up year 
after year as Mr. Ford has been, into being a mere employer, I 
should have wanted at least by this time to break out into being 
a plain, careless fellow human being — do something the way 
anybody would — that is, something I felt like doing because I 
felt like doing it. Mr. Ford was beginning to feel that, after 
all, it was at best a dog's life measuring off people's precise 
deserts in dollars and cents — a poor, narrow, stop-watch, cash- 
register life, always being a kind of detective of Economy, work- 
ing fourteen hours a day year after year on never too much or 
too little for anybody, never too much or too little for anything. 
"Here is ten million dollars!" he murmurs to his people. '*I 
don't care whether you deserve it. For God's sake don't say 
anything or explain anything or thank me for anything. HERE 
IS TEN MILLION DOLLARS! Take it! Do what you like 
with it! Go to heaven with it! Go any where with it ! Experi- 
ment a little if you like in a small way on feeling like a millionaire. 
What I want just now is something for myself. I want ten 
million dollars' worth of letting myself go— letting myself go 
the way any poor man can, or a poet !— ten million dollars' worth 
of not knowing whether I'm a millionaire or not!" 

Of course I do not claim that Mr. Ford would have expressed 
himself in just this way— in so many words. Ten million dollars 
to express himself with was a more natural way for Mr. Ford 



MR. FORD AND HIS FACTORIES 103 

to express himself than for me, but this might have been at least 
a part of what the ten million dollars meant, and I can only put 
it faithfully down as my first explanation of what looked to most 
people, at least at first apparently, like an indiscriminate dump. 
Mr. Ford felt tired and lonely before his 20,000 men, weary of 
always being efficient with them, of always being pigeonholed 
by them, and set one side by them as a mere employer — weary 
of being eternally looked at by 20,000 men not as himself but as 
a kind of cast-iron or bronze Statue of an Employer. 

It was a kind of employer strike. It took the form of an 
advertisement, a rather poignant bulletin in dollars and cents 
posted up on the walls of his factory, telling his men he wanted 
them to understand that he had different business motives and 
different business ambitions, and was a different kind of business 
man from what they might naturally have been led to expect. 

Mr. Ford was struggling up through his money to an under- 
standing with his men. 



Professor G spoke up glibly at the club one night when 

I made some casual mention of Ford. 

He said he was demoralizing business, treating everybody 
alike, that it was unfair to his competitors to do what not every- 
body could do, and that he was making labour discontented 
everywhere. 

He seemed to think that Mr. Ford, spending his whole life 

at it, had not thought of things that he. Professor G , had 

thought of off-hand, the minute he read it in the paper. He 
was especially indignant about Mr. Ford's treating everybody 
alike. 

The objections to treating everybody alike are obvious. Any- 
body could make them and make them off-hand. And the mo- 
ment I thought of that — that anybody could have thought of 
them — I thought that perhaps if I could put in my time on 
things about Mr. Ford that not everybody could have thought 



104 WE 

of, it might count more. I admit that the thing that Henry 
Ford had done was an incredible thing that hardly anybody 

would do. 

That is just it. AVhen I see a man succeed in building up 
an enormous and successful business by doing over and over 
again the thing that hardly anybody would do, I cannot say I 
suddenly feel superior when I see him doing another. When I 
see a man like Henry Ford who has succeeded by monotonously 
seeing things first, quietly getting up in his place in this nation, 
in Detroit, Michigan, and looking like a fool, it seems to me time 
to keep an eye on him ! I am comparatively little interested in 
seeing what everybody is thinking about Ford, i What interests 
me is what Ford is thinking. I want to let other people go for 
a little and find out. (iuessing on what Henry Ford thinks 
interests me more than knowing what other people think. Here 
is my first guess for what it is worth — as to Mr. Ford's *' indis- 
criminateness." 

Perhaps not being discriminating was the precise point that 
Mr. Ford, at just this time, had in mind. The best of employers 
cannot but get their discriminating wrong quite a good deal of 
the time, and Mr. Ford at last, in a vigorous attempt to work 
through to an understanding with every one of his men and 
establish a better mutual basis for working together, thought he 
would just make a clean sweep for once — treat everybody alike, 
assume everybody was doing, or would be doing soon, the best he 
could, and see what came of it. 

"Some of you," he says practically to his men, "have helped 
me earn this money all you could, and others of you I dare say 
have helped me earn it as little as you could, but I and my fore- 
man cannot he sure that we have never made any mistakes about 
what you do or don't do or try to do, and while we cannot run 
this factory as a regular thing without making distinctions 
between you, it is not at all unlikely that out of 24,000 
men we are getting a thousand or so of you wrong, and 
—well, anyway, here is the money— same to all of you, and 



MR. FORD AND HIS Fx^CTORIES 105 

all I can say is that I want to express the idea, and express it 
indiscriminately rather than not at all, that a lot of this money, 
which under our present, transitional, twisted industrial system 
is supposed to belong to me, belongs to you. It does not seem 
to be practicable, just yet at least, for a man at the top of a 
factory to have a regular habit of acting like a God — a habit of 
being precisely the same with the just and the unjust — but if 
there are, out of 24,000 men, a thousand or so of you who have 
not helped me earn this money as hard as you might, all I can 
say is, 'Here are a few million dollars I wish you would earn!' 
And I am just paying you in advance. So far as some of you are 
concerned, I have been paying you afterward, when each week 
was over, for work I didn't get. Paying you in advance for 
work I hope to get could not possibly cost me very much more 
and could not be any more foolish than that. 

"And I should imagine you would really feel more like work- 
ing. I may be wrong in my guess on you, but at all events it's 
good business for me, as soon as I can, to find out what you are 
really like. Paying you in advance seems to me, all things 
considered, a rather cheap and sure way to find out. . . 
So here it is," Mr. Ford says to each workman, "this five hun- 
dred dollars. It's what I'm like. I've expressed myself as 
well as I can about you. I have put up a five-hundred-dollar 
wager on you. And now if you don't mind my thinking it (I'm 
not saying it to anybody but you) , it seems to me it's your turn 

next." 

3 

My third impression of Mr. Ford came when I found myself 
reducing his problem to its lowest terms. I found myself think- 
ing, or trying to think, what 24,000 men, if they were boiled down 
to one man, would be like, and how in their boiled-down state 
and in a convenient size they would probably act. A good many 
problems in human nature unkink a good deal, I find, when one 
tries thinking them out in smaller terms — in terms one is more 
used to. 



106 WE 

One single man (every man knows who has tried being one) 
is really, when he thinks of it, a tremendously boiled-down 
crowd. And he feels like a crowd inside, too. And he acts like 
several. Supposing then, for instance, Mr. Ford's 24,000 men 
were one man, that one man could be relied on to be considerably 
mixed. In some parts of him he would be earning extra money 
and in some parts he would not. Mr. Ford says to this one man : 
"There is one particular thing in you which if it could be changed 
would make all the rest of you earn three times as much." Mr. 
Ford then proceeds to attract the man's attention to himself 
with some money, gives him five hundred dollars to probe in 
himself with and to find out his weak point. He tries to make a 
little shock of surprise on the nerve of his imagination about 
himself. 

It is rather hard for a great factory, pawing away with a 
thousand machines on a man, to work into him much imagina- 
tion about himself. The employer has to reach right in through 
the machines and attend to it. The Ford Company has built 
up an enormous business on conceiving steel machines and on 
planning with a rather unusual skill to get more work than other 
people could out of steel machines. 

What Mr. Ford seems to have thought of has been to spend 
ten million dollars on making the men in his factory as efficient 
as men as his steel machines are as steel machines. Mr. Ford has 
solved over and over again the problem of how to make a ma- 
chine more efficient. To make a machine more efficient he 
makes the machine over, invents a way of fitting it into its job 
better. What he has gone to work on now is, "How can I make 
24,000 men over.?" 

As he goes up and down the rows of his men he finds naturally 
that some of the men need to be made over in some parts of them- 
selves and others need to be made over in others. He then looks 
around, of course, as any sensible man would, with a big engi- 
neermg problem in human nature, working away on 24,000 men 
at once, to see if there is any particular part in his men that could 



MR. FORD AND HIS FACTORIES 107 

possibly be attended to in all alike — that could be attended to 
by machinery, as it were, or with one swoop. Mr. Ford has 
always done things in this way — in swoops. It has been his 
ability to think in swoops where other people thought in dabs 
that has made his business what it is. 

It was not long before Mr. Ford found, as he went up and 
down his men, that there was one part that stood out, or seemed 
to stand out, in all of them, or in nearly all, that could be at- 
tended to by machinery — that is, by putting all the men through 
the same process. 

It was as if he had said or wanted to say to each man in the 
24,000: "The part of you that needs making over the most just 
now apparently is the way you feel about your work. You hate 
it. Or that's what it amounts to. There must be something 
the matter with the factory I'm furnishing you, if you hate it, or 
with the machines, or the system, or with you, or with me. I've 
tried everything I can think of to make my factory the best 
machine for making motor cars on earth. What I am trying to 
do now is to make my factory the best machine for manufactur- 
ing and bringing out the most efficient labouring men on earth. 
I have been trying in my way for years to be the most efficient 
employer. It's the only way I know of getting the men I want. 
But of course it is of no use for me to try to be the most efficient 
^mployer all alone. I want 24,000 men around me all day, 
every day, that I can feel help." 

What I should like to do next in this world would be to see 
the motor-car industry, which is perhaps the most characteristic 
industry of this age, the most strategic and most closely watched, 
the one most intimately and personally used by the men who are 
the employers of the world — I want to see this industry a kind 
of world-exhibit, and kind of Show Window on the world of 
the kind of men employers can get when they work for their men, 
and of the kind of employers men can get when they work for 
their employers. I want to prove where everybody can see it 
that paying as little as one can and working as little as one dares 



108 ^VE 

is poor business. I want to see the niotor-car industry the one 
in the world above all others which has succeeded in attracting 
employers who really like reducing prices and raising wages more 
than they have to, and in attracting workmen who love to 
work. 

I believe that if capital (when in a position to do so) will 
treat labour steadily and honestly better than it deserves, labour 
will be shamed into working with it and not against it. 

Labour has paid an enormous bill for fifty years in trying to 
shame capital into being as decent as labour thought it was, 
and it is now the business of capital to foot the bill and fur- 
nish the brains for getting the labour it has thrown away back 
again. 

Henry Ford believed in the Ford car and peace. His work- 
men did not. The world did not. 

He proposed to get his workmen to believe in peace by starting 
some peace up in his factory and letting everybody try it. 

He thought that if he could put the Ford car and peace to- 
gether, the car would be better and cheaper and the Ford car 
and peace would go everywhere together. 

He thought that if he could make the car cheaper with peace 
or peace more practical with the car, the world would agree with 
him about the Ford car and peace both. 

Mary had a little Ford, 
Its Peace was white as snow. 
And everywhere that Mary went. 
That Ford was sure to go. 



This brings me to my next impression. 

Perhaps Mr. Ford was not merely struggling up through his 
money to an understanding with his men. He wanted other 
people to understand. It was no mere ten-million-dollar confi- 
dence between himself and his workmen— as to what he wanted 



MR. FORD AND HIS FACTORIES 109 

for himself, or hoped gradually to be allowed to be like himself — 
but it was a ten-million-dollar bit of confidentialness (alm.ost for 
the first time) between a millionaire and a world. Mr. Ford's 
action was a huge notice — a kind of cry for help in every paper 
of the world, an advertisement for friends, for fellow human 
beings — addressed to a whole race from a helpless millionaire, 
to the general effect that being a mere millionaire and hum- 
drumming along getting all he could out of people, bored 
him. He wanted everybody to see what (to any fairly 
thoughtful original man) making too much money was really 
like. 

It was a kind of Ford billboard, a notice served on capital 
and on labour and on all people everywhere — a sign, a sublime 
handbill sent out through all the streets of all the world. Is not 
every third car a Ford.f^ It was like a sign on every third car 
one meets (wheel on the left) flying down the road: "made by 

A BORED MILLIONAIRE." 



This brought me to my fifth stage. I think it is going to be 
hard to overestimate, very soon now, the importance of this 
first advertisement of Mr. Ford's being bored. When we have 
enough bored millionaires — that is, millionaires who are throw- 
ing up their regular job of charging the public all that they can 
and of paying their men as little as they dare, millionaires who 
break away into being of some use in the world, and of some 
interest to themselves and to other people — we will have a new 
world, a world in which we will see socialists and syndicalists 
losing their jobs. I like to think of this. This as it has seemed 
to me is one specific idea that Henry Ford in his action has tried 
to express. He says in effect, socialism and syndicalism are at 
best mere temporary jobs that have been made for people by 
millionaires who could not think. I aniiree to admit — for one — 
that the very first moment our millionaires in America begin to 
get down to the roots of their difficulty, begin to think, they will 



no WE 

have to ask the sociaKsts and syndicaHsts to help them. What 
we have been waiting for has been a milUonaire to ask them to 
help. 

6 

This brings me to my sixth stage of impression of Henry 
Ford. Here is a millionaire — I caught myself saying to myself 
— who has let the socialists and syndicalists help him think. 
He has listened hard to what they have to say. It has oc- 
curred to him that very much of what they have to say 
could be said by a millionaire better than they could say 
it. So he has tried to think of something to do that would 
say it. Nothing is settled yet. We are all thinking out loud 
together how we can get a new world. And now Henry Ford 
says in effect modestly that thinking with money is as prac- 
tical and useful a job as thinking without money. Anyway, 
here he is. He has earned the money and he is thinking 
with it. 



This brought me to my seventh stage. It began to come over 
me what the next thing would be that is going to happen with the 
whole world looking on and watching Mr. Ford. It is going to 
occur to people, especially to great masses of socialists, that 
thinking with money— provided a man is an equally good 
thinker— is as useful and practical a job as thinking without 
money, and quite as respectable. People are going to begin, 
socialists and syndicalists and all, to believe in inspired million- 
aires. 

At all events, if I had had a carte blanche and had had it 
all planned out and had decided just what arrangement I ought 
to make next to cheer or scare socialists or syndicalists into be- 
hevmg in inspired millionaires, the precise arrangement I would 
have made would have been Henry Ford. I cannot speak for 
Mr. Ford categorically, but I can say that if I had been in Mr. 



MR. FORD AND HIS FACTORIES 111 

Ford's place, and wanted to throw socialists and syndicalists 
out of a job in some way that they would really like, I would do 
just what Mr. Ford has done. There is nothing after all so 
noble or even useful about thinking without money that social- 
ists and syndicalists are going to' insist forever on doing their 
thinking in that way. If they see a man alongside them who is 
thinking with ten millions, they will not very much longer stand 
out against his thinking with it and against his inviting them to 
help him think with it. They are going to join in and help. 
All the socialists and syndicalists who can really think (as fast 
as millionaires open up) are going to accept from them thinking- 
with-money positions. When money thinks, socialism and syn- 
dicalism as such will disappear of their own accord and on their 
own suggestion. 

The inestimable service that only socialists could ever have 
performed for this world is now nearly all in. 

A few years ago most thoughtful young men, the moment 
they began thinking at all and going beneath the surface, began 
by being something very like socialists. There was nothing 
else to do, then, if one kept thinking. I can well remember, 
probably almost any man can, the day when I thought I was 
a socialist, and I was certainly about to become one, when it 
came over me suddenly that I wouldn't have time — that mil- 
lionaires would soon begin to think. They would have to. 
And I thought that if I went at it in the right way and under- 
stood them and kept fair and human, I could possibly get one 
of the first jobs of helping them. It has seemed to me not only 
the newest but the most promising, the most immediately 
practical of all the skilled occupations opening to men to-day, 
helping millionaires to think. And the market is endless. 
And now we see millionaires themselves on every hand already 
joining in and trying to help one another to think. And it is 
not the least of the encouraging signs of the times that the 
most stupendous device for millionaires' thinking the world 
has yet been supplied with — a kind of Derrick for Ideas — has 



m WE 

been thought of and set up (and can now be seen working any 
day, all the miUionaires in the world looking on) by a million- 
aire in Detroit, Michigan. 

.8 

The eighth stage in my impression of what Henry Ford was 
doing for peace came when a man in the smoking-room of the 
Merchants' Limited, who had been abusing Ford all the way 
from New Haven to Providence, broke in on me in some little 
innocent thing I was saying. "Ford is a prig! " he said. " What 
I can't bear is to see a little upstart mechanic like Henry Ford 
get up suddenly before the world and go about saying with a 
flourish of ten million dollars to all the other millionaires of 
the world, 'Why are you not more like me?' " 

"That is just it! That is just where his courage comes in:" 
I said. "Don't you suppose Henry Ford knew that for days and 
for weeks afterward men would be sitting in parlour cars all 
over this country saying about him just what you are saying. ^^ 
The real courage that is back of his action is that he lets him- 
self look like a prig when all the time what he is really feeling, 
or rather assuming, is that capitalists all about him, as a matter 
of course and in every city in the land, are taking to-day an 
attitude of sharing with labour and of sharing with the public 
that nobody would have dreamed of a few years ago. Mr. 
Ford is practically saying: 'Other millionaires are as bored as 
I am with buying and selling and hiring on the old humdrum 
idea that everybody except ourselves must get as little out of 
it as we can make them. One of us might as well speak up.' " 
Mr. Ford believes he is speaking for thousands of employers. 
He may admit he is a little early, because he has put himself in 
a position where he can afford to be early. 

There are scores and hundreds of millionaires— many of us 
know them— who are filled with the same indignation and hope 
toward their own class, toward the employing class, that Henry 
^ord is— employers who in the same spirit that Henry Ford is 



MR. FORD AND HIS FACTORIES 113 

are fighting with their money every day against their own class 
and strugghng with banks and stockholders to give every man 
a chance. 

And there are thousands or hundreds of thousands more 
employers and capitalists in America who would like to show 
feehngs like Mr. Ford's toward labour, but who are not just 
now in a position to express their feelings quite as loudly and 
simply as Mr. Ford does. 

The typical American employer to-day is seeing every day 
many of the things the socialists see, and he would like to help 
get them for his own men or for the world. He merely dis- 
agrees about the way of getting th-eni. Mr. Ford in his present 
action is representing these employers. He is merely thinking 
out loud with a few million dollars, hoping and believing other 
men will butt in and think, too. He is trying to see what there 
is that a man with some factories in one hand and some banks 
in the other can do in the way of socializing business, and 
getting some of the more immediate and pressing things the 
socialists want. The socialists have been telling him for years 
that he cannot do anything. Mr. Ford's idea is that somebody 
has to begin somewhere, with something besides talking, even 
if it is only the humble and despised millionaire. The mil- 
lionaire is letting the socialist try. Why should not the so- 
cialist let the millionaire try? Ordinary business men — men who 
have a little money and who do not quite come up to the standard 
of misery socialists require, ought to be allowed to try, too. 

So here, for what it may be worth, for better or worse, come^^ 
Henry Ford with his huge ten-million-dollar advertisement 
of his present hopeful convictions about the American busi- 
ness man and about having every man in America, rich or 
poor, do something himself and begin where he is. 

9 

My ninth impression — (I think it was ninth) — at least it 
is the impression I had to deal with next — was that perhaps 



114 WE 

Mr. Ford was advertising his own business. It almost seemed 
like an anticlimax at first, and I was a little sorry, or, at least 
in a vague pained way, I thought I ought to be sorry. 

Then I grew glad. It suddenly occurred to me how I wished 
he would! I can only tell it just as it happened to my mind. 
Anyone can judge for himself. 

The Metropolitan Insurance Company some years ago wanted 
a free advertisement for its business and built itself the high- 
est tower in the world. People would have to talk about it, 
look at it, and fill the world with pictures of it, and it was an 
advertisement, too — that vast billboard of steel and glass — 
that could be all used all over inside every day and all paid 
for all over inside every day, by thousands of people. 

The Ford Motor Car Company, in much the same way 
several years ago, in casting about for some advertisement 
everybody would talk about free, put up quietly, almost before 
anybody knew it, the lowest-priced car in the world! The bare 
mathematics of a Ford car, Mr. Ford decided — the very re- 
ceipted bill for a Ford car — would have to be genuine, honest, 
personal news to every man on this planet. Mr. Ford wanted 
every man on the planet to say it must be a lie and look into 
it and prove it. 

The Metropolitan Tower was the highest building on earth 
— one only a few people could have. The Ford car was to be 
the cheapest car on earth — one almost everybody could afford 
to have, and of course almost everybody, being personally 
concerned, began talking about it; and now of course (anyone 
can see it going on) every third car one meets (wheel on the 
left) five or six people in it goes driving past the population 
of the globe saying or seeming to say, "Ford Car! Cheapest 
Car in the world! A miracle in fewness of dollars! How does 
Ford do it?" The cars fly back and forth and up and down 
the world, saying, "Henry Ford!" What is he like? How 
does he do it? How can I do such things, each man says to 
himself: ''How can I do it in my line?" 



MR. FORD AND HIS FACTORIES 115 

Mr. Ford has thought out the best advertisement and 
made the deepest, most sensational appeal to human nature 
he could have made. A man doing a marvel is more adver- 
tised to-day than a man who gets rich. There is not a man 
living who is not touched by it, for there is not a man living 
who at bottom would not rather do a miracle than merely 
get rich, and now here is Henry Ford, a man in Detroit, 
Michigan — the cars fly up and down the world telling 
it — who is getting everything in at once apparently, in one 
short life. He is getting in his miracles and his riches 
besides. 

Very soon now the thoughtful but rutty business man still 
jogging along on the old platitude that what business is for is 
to make money will see that it is just because Henry Ford has 
some other object than making money in his business, that all 
the world has conspired to help him make it. Everybody is 
a partner in the Ford Motor Company, because every man 
knows, from the men in the shops to the crowds in the streets, 
that he is sharing, or can share if he likes, in the profits of the 
Ford business. Every man who puts a stroke of work on a 
car, every man who rides in one or gets a bundle from out of 
one, becomes identified with the Ford Company of Detroit, 
Michigan, U. S. A. 

I do not know how other people feel about it, but I have a 
conviction that any business that is so big, shrewd, inspired 
and practical in spirit that it is successfully treating every 
man in the world as one of its partners — any business that is 
making money for every man in the world is entitled to all the 
free advertising it may be able to get. The more advertising 
a man like Henry Ford gets for nothing the better for all of us. 
It does me good to think of it — to think that every third car 
in the world is running around this minute telling everybody 
everywhere about a business in which making money is a by- 
product. As I see the cars go by, I keep thinking of it, of the 
truth they roll through the world : if money is not being made 



116 



AVE 



IN A BUSINESS TO-DAY AS A BY-PRODUCT, THERE IS NOT GOING 
TO BE VERY MUCH OF IT ! 

Men who are clever enough, who have business imagination 
enough to make money as a by-product of reducing prices and 
raising wages to employees— even as a by-product apparently 
of throwing ten million dollars away in one week — can have so 
far as most of us are concerned all the free publicity, and all the 
chance to beat their competitors, that they want. We do not 
understand it quite all at once, but if men are building a world 
for us before our eyes, first we w^atch them. Then we fall over 
each other to help them. 

10 

There are those who may say that what Mr. Ford has really 
attempted is a huge international ten-million-dollar advertise- 
ment from the Ford Company that it wants the best labour on 
earth. It is a notice to all the best labour to flock away from 
everybody else to the Ford factory in Detroit, Michigan. 

The answer to this is that, as a matter of fact, Mr. Ford has 
not drawn men away from other factories. No one can set 
one side what Ford does, by saying that he gets picked men. 
Ford makes a practice of taking anybody and always using 
the men he has. Ford's idea is that any man will respond to 
his treatment. It is a part of his factory's business to make 
men over. And it is the most paying part of his business. 
The only men Ford goes out of his way to pick out are con- 
victs. 

He touches the men's imaginations. 

But what if it were true that Mr. Ford tried to bully the 
labour market of the world and get all the firsts in it and make 
other factories take seconds.^ 

I believe that the world's only answer to this is that if an 
employer deserves the best help in the world and is going to 
make the best use of it, he should have it. Anything Ford gets 
out of the world the world feels he will pay back. It pleases 



MR. FORD AND HIS FACTORIES 117 

us to have our cars cheaper. Better labour for Ford, cheaper 
cars for us. 

11 

Some people say Mr. Ford is not fair to the newspapers. 
He ought to pay for publicity like other manufacturers. 

But the trouble with newspapers is that they are dependent 
on their readers — on all of us — and have to give people what they 
want to read. 

Mr. Ford is news. He comes under the head of news column 
and editorial matter. He is a part of what we pay our two 
cents for. It is our two cents apiece that is paying for Mr. 
Ford's advertising. It is not free at all. It is all paid for. 
Each man's two cents demanded it. 

Of course Mr. Ford might have spent his ten million in ad- 
vertising columns in the newspapers. But the fact is we are 
a little more sure of the way Henry Ford would spend ten mil- 
lion than we are of the way the newspapers would spend it. 

It pleases us to have our cars cheaper. It pleases us, too, 
that Mr. Ford instead of paying out ten million dollars adver- 
tising money to the newspapers has taken his ten million dol- 
lars and put it into the hands of the men who are going to be 
working for Ford and working for us. 

Why should the newspapers have the ten million dollars in- 
stead of the men who are slaving away for Ford and for cheap 
cars for us? It was a better bargain for Ford and for every- 
body to put his advertising appropriation right down into the 
shop where it would help him run the shop, where every dollar 
everj^ day all of the year would oil the machines, smooth out 
the thoughts of his men for him, and make the men true to him 
and to the Ford car and true to themselves and to their work. 
Mr. Ford thought that a bill for ten million dollars' worth of 
self-respect in his factory, a bill for heartiness, spontaneousness 
and hope (the business being as it was) would be cheap. The 
beautiful part of it was, too, that in addition to being cheap, it 



118 WE 

would be news — world-news — and he would get his ten mil- 
lion dollars' worth of advertising thrown in for nothing besides. 

Of course this was not Mr. Ford's main thought or it wouldn't 
have been thrown in. Some of us may cavil over this but only 
for a minute. If a man can do or keep doing such big significant 
things with his money, that the newspapers to serve their cus- 
tomers have to tell everybody all about his business for nothing, 
the newspapers and all of us are to be congratulated. The 
newspaper is in a fair way to get a world worth being a news- 
paper in. And we are in a fair way to be in a world where read- 
ing a newspaper makes us respect our business and want to keep 
on with our lives. Henry Ford — whatever else there may be 
that is the matter with him — is really news, and a big newspaper 
ought to be willing to print at least some of the news for nothing. 

The more news a great newspaper prints or can get to print 
for nothing, the more the other news in it — the news it pays for — 
is worth. The newspapers need not be nervous about getting 
more good news than they can afford. Neither may business 
men. 

Possibly the reason more big business men do not get adver- 
tised in this country free is that there isn't really anything about 
them or about their business or the way they run it that any- 
body especially wants to know, or that anybody would be es- 
pecially interested in if they did. 

Mr. Ford is not getting for nothing out of the papers what 
other people would have to pay for. What Mr. Ford is getting 
other people could not get by paying for it. 

In this aspect Ford's advertising is one of the most interesting 
and instructive spectacles the country has had, and it may not 
be amiss to dwell on it a little. 



I have been for some time a more or less curious and inter- 
ested student of advertisements and of the ways of advertising 
men, and have made a kind of amateur study of sensations and 



MR. FORD AND HIS FACTORIES 119 

the law of sensations, and if I were asked by a young advertising 
man (some one please ask me now!) what were the two best 
rules I could think of for making a sensation, I would put them 
down like this : 

First. Do not try. 

Second. Do not need to try. To make a sensation be one. 
Then other people will attend to it — people in general, people 
going by in the streets — anybody and everybody will do your 
advertising for you and do it for nothing. Henry Ford has 
never needed to hunt up some way of making a stir or sensation. 
The Ford car at its price has been a stir or sensation of itself. 

And it goes deeper than this. 

The real reason that the Ford car is a sensation is that Ford is. 
A man like Ford in business to-day — the way he is made inside 
and the way his mind works — is personal and necessary news 
to everybody. Everybody has to advertise Henry Ford whether 
he wants to or not. 

Of course it is true that Henry Ford had to be news quite a 
while (our newspapers being run as they are) without any- 
body's finding it out, and the public as usual has had to pay out 
millions of dollars a week itself, personally, to Mr. Ford himself 
to get the news about him, and it has had to buy its news and 
ride in its news before it could hope to get it into the newspapers, 
but there never has had to be any straining or reaching around 
sideways at people in Ford as a sensation. The shrewd, eco- 
nomical and honest way in which he has assembled, hammered 
together and built up a personality out of the materials he had 
in business life around him is a sensation of itself. And every 
inch of a Ford car is a sensation, too — stirs and thrills with it, 
has bones and nerves of meaning — every inch saying or seeming 
to say how cheap, sinewy, how incredibly, visionarily honest it 
is. In fact, the Ford cars (at least this is what it amounts to) as 
one looks at them in the streets may be said to be perfectly 
honest, portable, innumerable replicas of Henry Ford of Detroit, 
Michigan, on wheels! 



120 WE 

The people in Ford cars are not the only ones that enjoy them. 
They fly through the streets addressed to all of us— happy valen- 
tines about the world and about the way things are going in it. 
Millions of them go rolling, whispering, almost softly shouting 
through the streets how he treats his public and how he treats 
his men. 

Business is not a barren waste to-day, men think as the 
Ford cars go. It is full of lusty and mighty men figuring out 
patiently at desks, in shops, in dollars and cents the hopes and 
faiths of men and the plans of God. 

Instead of merely founding another university for the world 
with ten million dollars, Mr. Ford is making the world itself a 
university. Ten thousand factories have gone to school and the 
streets are full of people learning. He has arrested the atten- 
tion of us all. We are criticising, praising, studying. Hotels, 
ocean liners, Pullman smoking-rooms, Delmonicos, Baltimore 
Lunches and libraries, even churches and colleges, are learning 
to think. 

Mr. Ford is essentially an educational man. He believes that 
big business consists in educating his employees, in educating his 
stockholders and consumers, in getting men's attention to ideas 
through action and through their daily work. He has achieved a 
supreme feat in education, in getting men's attention — in adver- 
tising. Mr. Ford is advertising for a new working world. With 
a few bold strokes or sketches, tentative suggestions, he is now 
before us all, asking for bids from any firm on earth, for a new^ 
world. It can either join him in making his, or start on one for 
itself. 

I do not wish to be put down as an unqualified advocate of 
Henry Ford. I am not engaged as an author in handing out for 
Henry Ford moral blank checks with my name signed to them 
that he can fill in any time with any remarks and with any ac- 
tions he likes. 

I admit that it would be safer for me to sav these pleasant 
thmgs about Mr. Ford if he were dead. It is always inconven- 



MR. FORD AND HIS FACTORIES 121 

lent having a man around living along recklessly and promi- 
nently after one has said good things about him. I am far from 
agreeing with Mr. Ford in everything he says or is reported to 
have said, and there are important ideas organic in machine 
labour in which I might differ with Mr. Ford, but so far as what 
he has done in his factory to date is concerned, the main driving 
power in the man is right. He has the We-vision, the We-spirit, 
and the We-will, and as long as he keeps this he will stand as he 
does now — as the most signal dramatization in the eyes of the 
world of American genius and American democracy, and of the 
spirit and the methods to be employed in getting the attention 
of the nations to peace. Mr. Ford's factory is the best adver- 
tisement of how peace works that either America or any other 
nation has yet had. 

Over against Carnegie America puts forth Ford. 

Over against the Krupp gun America puts forth the Ford 
car. 

As a substitute for the four hundred million dollars we are 
going to spend on an army and navy against the world, I would 
have the United States with a part of its four hundred million 
dollars buy a million Ford cars and send them out as advertise- 
ments of what Americans are like to defend us against a world. 
Suppose it is Germany we are afraid of — we will swamp Frank- 
fort-on-the-Main with Ford cars, every one with a sign on it 
saying: ''Another car like this can be had for twelve hundred marks 
($300) . // a half million cars are sold by the end of the year, you 
will get two hundred marks back, it will cost you one thousand marks 
($250) . The workmen ivho make this car are earning a third more 
loages a day because they feel like working and enjoy working a 
third harder a day. Henry Ford's ivorkmen and Henry Ford 
together are getting ready to present a car in which the labouring 
man shall go to his work.''' 

Who will want to fight us? Who are the labouring men in 
what nation that can be got to fight a Henry Ford America.^ 



XVI 
MR. CARNEGIE AND HIS MONUMENTS 

We have had in this country a kind of disease of monuments. 
We are much preoccupied in getting a Uving in America, and the 
moment that one by one we wake up artistically and our first 
feeling for the beautiful comes to us, it naturally runs to head- 
stones. There is a certain type of mind in America that appar- 
ently cannot help breaking out into monuments — putting f agades 
and Grecian temples on things. Just now it is engaged (down 
in Washington) in putting a Parthenon on to Abraham Lincoln. 

There seems to be nothing so safe in its own innate nobleness 
or quality that there does not seem to these people to need to be 
a monument standing up for it, and apologizing for it — and 
flourishing. They have worried us all over the country into 
having hands-in-the-bosom statues of bronze statesmen in parks, 
cast-iron columns of simple soldiers, hero prizes for not letting 
people drown. A plain, noble, magnificently scrawny, rail- 
splitting, log-cabin person— a little-red-schoolhouse sort of 
person like Lincoln — has to go down to posterity apologized for, 
pieced out with an Acropolis, with thirty-eight columns forty-six 
feet high— eleven thousand tons and two million dollars' worth 
of empty marble. So we have poor, simple-hearted Lincoln 
pilloried there— a huge hollow air of looking more important 
than he wanted to or hoped he'd have to— forever! 

We must learn to reckon with these people probably. Every 
country has periods and streaks of them— hordes of well-mean- 
ing folks who cannot help going around putting up decorative 
fronts on beauty, draping strips of silk askew on mantelpieces, 
hanging huge red bows on poor, ashamed little dogs. 

122 



MR. CARNEGIE AND HIS MONUMENTS 123 

It seems to be the same instinct in people that makes a nice Httle 
heathen girl wear iron bracelets around her pretty ankles, or eke 
out her ears with dangling earrings. The silk hat represents 
this same yearning for monuments (even on themselves) many 
people have. I never see a man going around with a silk hat 
but I think of it and of how it expresses in him his wistful idea 
toward the beautiful — toward what is really important and 
really serious, and how I ought to be impressed by it. But I 
am not. It seems to me a kind of disease — a silk hat does. All 
monuments do. 

As applied to morals, or to a subject like peace, a monument 
represents a kind of mal-nutrition or moral anaemia in people. 
As applied to beauty it means mal-assimilation or appreciation. 
The same people will take an innocent flower looking like a little 
portrait of all the sunniness and dew and sky in the world, 
plump it into an awful and portentous gorgeous flower-pot, and 
with one blow of majolica wipe it off the face of the earth. They 
think they are appreciating and honouring the poor little flower. 

But what does the little flower think? 

This is the way I feel about Peace and about Mr. Carnegie's 
flower-pot for peace. What does Peace think of Mr. Carnegie 
walking up and down in front of it so and recommending it, and 
putting a fagade on it and trying to fix it up so that people will 
want it, by building a temple to it? 

The idea seems to be that the moment you are trying to be 
good or beautiful, or pat goodness or beauty on the back, you 
must keep them at any trouble and expense from being uncov- 
ered, you must not let people, any longer than can be helped, see 
them as they are. Many people in America feel this way, but 
do most of us? Is it what impresses us? 

I remember seeing in the Carnegie Institute on one of the 
buildings a great, clean, straight, noble, simple-minded, honour- 
able chimney that they had trigged out as a steeple. I believe 
it is a belfry, too, but do not quite remember. And they may 
put a chime on it yet — make the smoke ring tunes on little bells ! 



124 WE 

This is the tendency some of us want to resist. We cannot help 
feehng that there will be more hope for art in the Carnegie In- 
stitute the moment this chimney is stripped and gets down to 
business. Of course Mr. Carnegie may not be personally re- 
sponsible in this particular case, and of course the men who are all 
struggling away working under Mr. Carnegie can only do the 
best they can with this dress-parade tendency in the beautiful 
and useful — this plug-hat and drum-major view of life; but it is 
impossible not to point out and not to try to help relieve the 
situation and possibly help relieve the men as soon as possible. 
I do not think I am pointing out in Mr. Carnegie a mere per- 
sonal foible. It is a national, threatening, wholesale fallacy and 
an influence for evil that Mr. Carnegie has wrought through 
and through nearly all the good he does. 

I may carry it too far, but I find as I go about the country to- 
day, every time I see a great, bragging, blind facade before the 
beautiful, I want to stave a hole in it, strip it away until our 
people shall see and love the beautiful deeply, passionately, at 
last, not for the strange unbelieving things they do to it or let 
people do to it — scarfs, tassels, feathers, ribbons and marble 
pillars they put in front of it — but for what it really is. 

I do not believe this is the way to impress people with Peace. 

I have seen the faces of the men pouring out of the Ford 
factory. 

I have seen that Peace is a sublime energy — a passionate, 
unfathomable flowing out of human life. 

It does not need a temple. 

I do not particularly admire the peacock, and I do not like 
any longer than can be helped to have people think as they do 
abroad sometimes that we ought to have the peacock instead of 
the eagle for our national bird. If I lived in a castle or bishop's 
palace, I would not have a peacock about the place; but there 
is one thing about the peacock, however superficial he may 
be, he grows his own fagade himself. Out of the roots of his 
bemg he lifts it up. A peacock's tail is a perfectlv honest. 



JVIR. CARNEGIE AND HIS MONUMENTS 125 

faithful, detailed reproduction or portrait of the inside of his 
mind. 

All the lower animals are like this. This is all one can ask 
of anybody. Here is peace for instance — peace in factories, 
and peace between nations. 

If a peacock had to have a temple, he would let it grow, let 
it flower out, or, rather, feather out, from a factory. 

Here is the American college, for instance. Education is a 
divine energy, a central fire of the spirit. Men get their torches 
lighted for life with an education. Carnegie puts up a great 
fagade in front of it and makes it respectable. Here is Peace 
— a divine, terrible, unfathomable energy in the human heart 
like love, like childbirth, which tosses up cathedrals out of 
the earth like little waves, builds cities which love it, tears down 
empires that defy it — and Mr. Carnegie has taken peace, put 
a great stone fagade up in front of it, and made peace respect- 
able. Of course in a way a fagade for Peace or Education, that 
one has to peek around or over, does not hide it altogether. 
"It is just Mr. Carnegie's foible," people tell us, and it is not 
very serious in a way. We must learn to be tolerant. Mr. 
Carnegie has this little rubber stamp of respectability he al- 
ways has to put on things with which he has anything to do. 
Why make a to-do about it.f^ He cannot keep his hands off. 
He cannot help going about standardizing, platitudinizing, 
making everything in sight and all the men and all the ideas he 
touches or butts into with money look alike — look like rows of 
library buildings. "We must take what he has to give and 
let the rest go." 

But it seems to me it is a much graver question than this. 
It is not a question of what Mr. Carnegie is like. It is the 
much more important question of what the American people 
are like. Mr. Carnegie says in effect, and to the whole world, 
that we are a certain kind of people, that the sort of thing that 
he does to us and keeps doing to us impresses us. He thinks 
that the Carnegie way works. I merely put the question : Does 



126 WE 

it? It is not a mere question about Mr. Carnegie but about 
us. Can the American people be put off with fagades or will 
they insist on what is behind them.? Is Mr. Carnegie really 
to be encouraged in the idea that he is impressing us in this 
way? Is there nothing that can be done to head him off? 

Nothing, unless the American people will speak up or some 
one will speak up for them. This is what I believe the American 
people really feel about Mr. Carnegie's attempt to impress 
people with Peace. 

It is not a real stone facade, or noble library look on Peace 
that the American people want. As it looks to us, Peace is, 
rather, a splendid transparent affair. You just look into it 
and see its works going round and round in it. For instance, 
to most men in America the way Ford's factory makes a man 
feel inside while he looks at it, and the way he feels again after- 
ward every time he thinks of it, is fagade enough. Peace does 
not need a fagade. The less fagade the better. One just 
looks in on it, sees it as it is any day — peace making the men's 
faces shine, peace making the engines go — and one swings one's 
hat. 

This is the gist of it, as it strikes our plain American people, 
I believe. A fagade on Henry Ford's factory making it look 
like a Parthenon would be as absurd as a fagade on Henry Ford. 



XVII 
MR. CARNEGIE AND MR. CARNEGIE 

What can Mr. Carnegie do with his enormous foundation, say 
from to-morrow morning on, to keep people from daring to 
look at Peace any longer as a far-off, other-worldly affair, a kind 
of backyard on heaven, a yearning or beautiful subject .^^ Can 
the dangerous and weakening associations Peace has, or seems 
to have, in people's minds with the words "love and above'* 
be forever, and once for all, broken up? I have been able to 
criticise, but am I able to point out a constructive program? 
What is there Mr. Carnegie can do, and do to-day, to keep Peace 
from now on from being an Angel, a Dove, a Monument, or 
a Lamb? 

First. He can take his fortune and turn it back as a vast 
public mirror on how he made it, and pay the bill for everybody 
to see how every dollar he presents the world with had peace 
wrought into it — peace between manufacturer and employee, 
between manufacturer and the people's Government, between 
manufacturer and consumers. 

Second. If Mr. Carnegie says, as he very truthfully might, 
that Peace, as an energy in business had not been invented 
or discovered or quite worked out yet, in the generation in 
which he made his money, Mr. Carnegie, instead of turning 
his money back as a mirror on how he got it, might turn it 
back and pay the bill for everybody to see how he keeps getting 
it now — let everybody see how Peace is being wrought out there 
for him in Pittsburgh day and night, into these dividends he is 
getting now, and that he is spending from week to week, from 
month to month now — in leading the spiritual interests of the 

127 



128 ^^E 

world, and in giving good advice to everybody, from little boys 
up to empires, about Peace. 

Third. If Mr. Carnegie says that he is not responsible for 
the way his money is being made now, that he has withdraw^n 
from Steel Management, and is merely drawing dividends, if 
Mr. Carnegie says that these stupendous sums of money he is 
drawing out and that he is daily spending on being a beautiful 
moral character, in telling the rest of the w orld to cheer up and 
to remember that it is going to be as good as he is as fast as he 
can pay for it, are being made in ways he regrets and in ways 
of which he does not approve; if Mr. Carnegie would spend a 
few million dollars a week, would take each million dollars as 
it came, turn it back on its hinges, make it a vast million- 
dollar mirror of where it came from, and of how it was made — 
if Mr. Carnegie would make a moving picture of each million 
as it comes along to him to-day; if, instead of using that mil- 
lion to lord it over the ideals of the rest of us, he would use it 
for a glorious, conclusive, immortal criticism of himself — so 
that by Carnegie's own will there would never be another Car- 
negie, so that by Carnegie's own will there would never be 
another Pittsburgh; there would be no limit to the praise and 
affection, to the thanksgiving of the people of all nations from 
generation to generation, for Andrew Carnegie, for what An- 
drew Carnegie had done for Peace, not merely to found Peace 
but to reveal Peace, to set Peace in motion, throughout a world. 

World-peace is every man's intimate personal peace, the en- 
ergy of his own daily work and play wrought out in his own life 
and mounting up into other lives until, like some imperious, 
mysterious floating electric force in the air, it becomes the at- 
mosphere of the world, like ozone, like lightning, becomes a 
kind of vast invincible storehouse and power-house of all life- 
sings its way up out of factories into the domes of capitols, 
hovers in the naves of great cathedrals, and turns softly the 
iron gates of empires. 

Fourth. If IMr. Carnegie cannot make his great fortune 



MR. CARNEGIE AND MR. CARNEGIE 129 

become in this way a great revelation — pro and con — one of 
the world's great spiritual experiences, if he does not see his 
way clear to spending his money in telling how he wished he 
had not made it, and on how he hoped and believed other people 
in the next generation would make theirs; if Mr. Carnegie 
does not feel that he can express this idea himself, he will pick 
out men who can, he will have these men spend his fortune in 
expressing this idea against himself — for him. In other words, 
Mr. Carnegie w^ill spend his money in deliberately finding out 
for four hundred years, for himself, for everybody, what is the 
matter with him. He will endow his own self-criticism, his 
own self -discrimination, and face a world at last unafraid. A 
single millionaire who would do in the sight of fifty nations what 
Tom L. Johnson did in the sight of the fifty wards of the city 
of Cleveland, would be a sublime, concentrated energy for good 
in this world, beside which Mr. Carnegie's huge, hollow, echo- 
ing Hague Palace and his little pretty vague helpless spatter of 
libraries would be as nothing. 

Fifth. If Mr. Carnegie cannot give us his peace experience 
— his own personal proofs of how peace works — the next best 
thing he can do is to spend a few million dollars on his own be- 
lief in peace experiments, in things men don't quite believe yet 
about peace. If he has been able to make so little headway in 
proving what he believes about peace, let him spend a few mil- 
lion dollars in proving what other men believe about it. Let 
him pay the bill, the laboratory bill, for letting other men try 
out their experiments and apply their inventions in the tech- 
nique of peace. 

Sixth. If he does not want to try out a few experiments in 
peace himself, and does not want to pay expenses for other 
people to make peace experiments, there are at least a hundred 
manufacturers who have already paid and who are now paying 
their own expenses in proving how peace works. What they 
have paid the bill and run the risk to prove, what they have 
made money out of proving, Mr. Carnegie might run the risk, 



130 WE 

perhaps, to advertise. He can spend his money on telling the 
news to every labourer in America, in France, Germany, Eng- 
land, to every labourer and every employer on earth, of how 
their experiments have turned out. These peace-energy busi- 
ness men are going to do everything anyway, but they are too 
busy doing it to be in the news business of how they do it be- 
sides. It is at least left over for Mr. Carnegie, if he cannot 
make peace work himself, to pay the bill for showing that other 
people can. 



XVIII 
MR. CARNEGIE AND OTHER PEOPLE 

Some man who had begun to be a httle interested — a peace- 
sociaHst, perhaps, will lay this book down about here and say 
he ought to have known better — he knew all along that even 
on a perfectly safe subject like a war three thousand miles away 
this book of mine — any book of mine — would probably sooner 
or later peter out into a millionaire. 

I can only say I have tried my best. I have never wanted 
VI a book or anywhere else to pay any more than a rather elegant 
iistant attention to millionaires. 

But here I am in this civilization trying to pry out a chink 
or a hole in it, where I or any man, any day labourer or artist, 
can get a little look through at blue sky and at God — and over 
every hole, every little dot of blue sky, or glimmer of God, 
there looms the huge swarthy shadow, part steel, part smoke, 
of a millionaire. "This hole is mine,'* he says. "What are you 
going to do with it.^^ " 

I challenge any man who is thorough to work his way through 
in this civilization to any hole and not find a millionaire there, 
taking tickets, and charging people for looking out of it. 

The only way we can do is to boost up from below a mil- 
lionaire who will pay people for coming up to the hole instead 
of charging them for it. 

I have no more expectation of the ordinary brittle, unmal- 
leable, cast-iron millionaire than any man. 

But the millionaire we are boosting up from below in this 
country, just now, interests me. 

I see him everywhere, each with his new invention hammer- 

131 



132 WE 

ing on the steel floor up over the world, and prying new holes. 
The only difference is that instead of using other men by keeping 
them down, he uses them by asking them to get up. With 
every blow of his hammer, he says We, ripping out a heaven 
for us from the steel floor of the world ! What is more, he makes 
us feel that we are doing it, that he could not do it without us. 
He makes us feel that if he does not do it, we will do it. If he 
will not be an inspired millionaire, we will. He knows we can- 
not lose. If he fails, some fresh man next to him, out of us all 
watching him, some man who can say We in some fresh, new, 
wilder or better way than he can, will take his place for us. 

It is because Henry Ford can say We with convicts, be- 
cause he dares to swing out enough to say We to unskilled 
labour, to people on whom the rest of us have given up, that 
I see him to-day grimly, faithfully, almost without knowing 
it, up on top of the steel girders — up over the cellar of the world, 
pulling sixteen thousand men up. 

But this is a small part of it. The real thing Henry Ford 
is doing is to show how anybody can pull anybody up. 

I often think of him. I see him daily there — a modest brown 
man, bent over and quietly, and all in the day's work, pulling 
religion and art, cathedrals and great nations up through the 
manhole of the world. I see that he is but a beginning. I have 
seen a man everybody is watching, who is making peace pay, 
who is making religion work. Soon everybody will. 

So I find myself a little jubilant, after all, as I go forth daily 
under the roar and under the girders, the miles of working 
windows. There is something that keeps saying in me, as 
some deep beat of music underneath, all the time, "Let the 
factories blow their whistles up and down the world and let the 
bells in the sleepy steeples ring, for soon we shall stand in the 
sun, with the sky over us and the air about us, and every man 
shall work and every man shall sing— and at last that hell of a 
far-off heaven my church has tried to drive me to believe in 
shall be stripped from the souls of men, and I shall see the people 



MR. CARNEGIE AND OTHER PEOPLE 133 

of this dear old familiar earth — these selfsame men I knew — 
going to and fro to their work and talking with God in the 
streets!" 

Religion as a kind of tunnel with stained-glass, to stumble to 
heaven through, is going by. 

In the meantime, until it does, this world, millionaires and 
all, is good enough for my religion or for my art. If I have to 
be in a tunnel full of Christians who feel superior to this world, 
in being good, I will not be a Christian. 

If I have to be in a tunnel full of artists who feel superior 
to this world while they are being beautiful, I will not be an 
artist. 

Grappling with a millionaire is poetry enough for me. It 
is the poetry that poets in this civilization have next got to 
face. x\nd I have always thought I would rather sing on a 
little ten-cent fife in a subway station — like blind Russell in 
Springfield — with that boundless scuffle of the w^eary and 
happy feet to pipe dances to, than be promoted to a choir-boy 
in a cathedral; and what I am going to do now is to push mj' 
way through to a place to be a poet in, among labour unions, 
among strikes and millionaires. I will sing their visions for 
them — and mine! I will stand under the great grim factory 
windows, where I hear in the grind of the wheels the fight for 
the peace of the world, and play my accordion ! 

I am afraid this chapter flies rather high for a brown modest 
man like Henry Ford. He will probably read it through out 
of courtesy, but he would rather lie flat on his back under an 
automobile and grope around with a wrench (as happy as a 
boy in the long grass!) than read about his own relation to his 
century. 

But Henry Ford can have his imagination about Henry Ford, 
and I can have mine. Anybody who reads can have his. No 
man quite finishes his own life. All the rest of us have our inn- 
ings at it. 

If Henry Ford is not what I think he is, if he is not engaged 



134 WE 

in filling out my order for him, it is open to anybody. There 
are seven thousand millionaires in this country who are going 
to take the places of the seven thousand we have now. Most 
of them are unknown now. Most of them are unmade now. 
Here is the chance. Any one of them can step in. 



XIX 

MR. CARNEGIE AND ME 

I protest against the burden that is laid upon me to speak 
in a great solemn moment of the destiny of the world like this 
against any humble and hopeful soul on this earth who has done 
or tried to do with his imagination, his money or his muscle^ — 
a single thing for peace. 

But I am burdened with the sense of the intimateness be- 
tween the ideals of America for its men of wealth and the fate 
of the nation. 

I protest against what Mr. Carnegie has done or may do as 
just being Mr. Carnegie and not America. I protest against 
the way he has seemed to speak as the voice of the colleges of 
our land. I protest against the way his library buildings have 
sprawled in front of literature, against the way his pensions have 
straddled colleges, run away with culture, and the way his 
money and he have stepped out in front of Peace. 

I invoke the ideals, the spirit, the clean and mighty laughter 
of our people. I call the attention of the world to the fact 
that Mr. Carnegie is not accepted in America as a typical 
American millionaire, that Mr. Carnegie is not and cannot be 
taken in Europe as our nationally authorized version — the 
countenance to the world of American wealth and of what Amer- 
ican money is like, of what American money sees and is seeking 
to do in the world and among the nations. 

I point to Henry Ford instead, to what he is saying about 
Peace in the way he makes his money. 

I hear the cries at night of a thousand battlefields for peace. 
I think of the millions of young men in my country who are 

135 



136 WE 

filled with a grim, silent, struggling idealism— a fearless, stern, 
and splendid desire for peace among the workmen and the em- 
ployers of my people. 

And so I have made my protest in behalf of the ideals and 
of the plain, human common sense of our men of wealth in 
America, and in behalf of the probity, freedom, the clean laugh- 
ter, the vigour and manliness of the intellectual life of my 
people. We will swing free before the eyes of the world. We 
will not have our great universities in Mr. Carnegie's pocket — 
our great men, churches, and bishops swinging and dangling at 
his belt. It does not represent us. It is not like us, and should 
not be supposed to be like us by the nations of the world. 

I have not meant to write at length in this way, but if one is 
ripping out once for all what has been built in with pomp as 
the cornerstone of the Peace of the World, one must take room. 

A revolution against Mr. Carnegie cannot be tucked away in 
a paragraph. He has been walking up and down in front of the 
Peace Palace as his own piazza so long that this nation must first 
get Mr. Carnegie to sit down, before anything about America and 
World Peace that goes under the surface can hope to be done. 

If Mr. Carnegie would sign these pages, if he could manage 
to say in time before he died, that he believed me; if to-day, 
or in a day or so, after he had thought it over, we could put 
our names together on a title page of a little book like this: 



I 

by Andrew Carnegie 

assisted by 
Gerald Stanley Lee 



it would start a revolution for peace. Most people think that I 
would sign what is in the book anyway, and they think Andrew 
Carnegie would not. 



MR. CARNEGIE AND ME 137 

It would do them more good to think that he would, than 
anything else in the world, or than anything. I could say. 

Mr. Carnegie has already been more frank about the dif- 
ficulties and embarrassments of being a millionaire than most 
of our millionaires, but he always stops in time to keep up ap- 
pearances — recovers himself in time to jump up on his pedestal. 

It is not too late yet. 

And what is wanted between millionaires and poor people in 
this country is a little mutual, confidential talk. 

I often think of it — of what two or three prominent million- 
aires in America could do in the way of making a great moral 
clearing in this country. What would it not mean if even one 
bitter, disappointed millionaire would stop going through the 
motions of looking happy before us and speak out? 

If two or three of our seven thousand unhappy millionaires 
would get up in their places, if they would confess to the people 
and make a clean breast to a nation, what is there we would 
not to do help them, to cooperate . with them? In this the 
world's great hour of doubt, in this hour of our suspense and 
hope, it would be hard to measure what it would do for us if 
one rich man would put his solitude with the solitude of the 
poor, uncover the failure, the wistfulness, the doubt, the won- 
der, the sorrow of his life — if one rich man would mingle before 
he dies — as a kind of sacrament of mutual confession, of mutual 
hope — his loneliness with ours ! 

I read yesterday that Mr. Rockefeller never reads a criticism 
of himself, and that he has not read one for years. 

The week after Henry Ford had annovmced his plan for his 
employees, when he was receiving several thousand letters and 
telegrams, thousands of editorials a day, from around a world, 
he had all of them sorted out and all of those that praised him 
were set one side. He had his secretaries pick out for him the 
six or seven best attacks, and read those. 

I refuse to believe this statement that John D. Rockefeller 
never reads criticisms, until he tells me himself. I do not deny 



138 WE 

I have moments of believing it— from many indications of his 
attitude toward the public (until very lately), but I keep a 
place open. Perhaps he does not read them because he wants 
better ones — criticisms that begin by understanding and that 
work out from that — cooperative criticisms that recognize his 
life as being his own problem as well as ours. 

But at all events, as I say, I keep a place open. 

Nor am I willing (as anyone can see) to give up on Andrew 
Carnegie. In what I have said of Mr. Carnegie in this book, 
I am not singling him out for special blame. He has done as 
well as he could — as most of us do. But as the shortest way 
for me to show how being a certain type of business man in 
America works, and where it lands a man, is to take the best, 
fairest, and most public sample we have, I have utilized Mr. 
Carnegie. It would be hard to pick out for this generation a 
more interesting, suggestive, and inspiring example of the 
kind of millionaire it no longer works to be like. All that the 
world is going to learn out of an Andrew Carnegie it will have 
to learn quickly and learn now while there is one. There is not 
going to be another. We must not waste the one we have. 
That is why I am writing as I do. I do not want an effort of 
Nature like Mr. Carnegie wasted. 

Mr. Carnegie and this book both have a large audience. So 
if our old and regular Mr. Carnegie fails to sign this book, I 
present it to the country to be signed. 

There are five hundred new Carnegies who will. 



I have been reading over this last chapter. 

I have applied my usual test to such things. How would I 
enjoy reading it out loud to Mr. Carnegie? 

If reading it out loud to Mr. Carnegie would make Mr. 
Carnegie believe it, I would never let any other man on earth 
see a word of it. It would be between us. Mr. Carnegie 
would quietly go to work the next morning proving how wrong 



MR. CARNEGIE AND ME 139 

I was, proving that nobody needed this chapter in all the world 
except him and me. All the world would see him beginning 
the next morning promptly moving his buildings away from in 
front of ideas everywhere he went and lifting up his heavy en- 
dowments from off the souls and bodies of men. Instead of 
trying to make his money lead, he would make it fall in behind, 
follow up the inspiration of others. He would make his mighty, 
drunk helpless fortune, the Power Plant of the Seers lighting 
the cities of the nations and turning the wheels of the world. 

But I am afraid it would not work to read this chapter aloud 
to Mr. Carnegie. Instead of changing himself he would pro- 
ceed in his persuasive way to change me and change the chap- 
ter. This brings me to the crux of the whole matter. 

This chapter is addressed not to Mr. Carnegie but to the 
people who take him seriously, who make it necessary, espe- 
cially to a thousand newspapers and to the men in high stations 
everywhere who encourage Mr. Carnegie, who keep him be- 
fuddled, dictatorial, deceived about others and deceived about 
himself. It cannot be endured standing by any longer with 
ninety million people watching Mr. Carnegie day after day still 
failing to see how in his sublime yearning — this awful public 
struggle of his not to die disgraced — he is muddling up the 
vision, warping the ideals of a nation, and withering the sinews 
of our young men and of an independent and mighty people, 
making everything in sight and every man and every idea he 
touches or paws over with a million dollars Icok like — like rows 
of his library buildings. 

I cannot find any better way of pointing up my idea than 
Mr. Carnegie. It is a notrCarnegie peace I want. 

I say that he does not represent America. 

To the world, Andrew Carnegie stands as our American idea 
of peace, all those big breathless newspapers in New York 
running down to the dock to meet him and watch him, with 
eager eyes and notebooks, standing and dropping pearls of wis- 
dom on the gangplank. 



140 WE 

It is not Mr. Carnegie I am making fun of. It is ourselves 
and the way we do not interfere with being represented — this 
big, busy, calm nation of America as being in such a breathless 
state of suspense about what Mr. Carnegie thinks the minute 
he gets across — as if he were Columbia the gem of the ocean. 
He is always taking this national or international form. We 
have treated Mr. Carnegie as if he were a kind of semi-oflScial 
legislature all by himself, or a kind of splendid but perfectly 
loose President banging around. 

The American nation will swing itself free in the eyes of 
the world from Mr. Carnegie and speak for itself. America 
will say to the world: That is Mr. Carnegie, you see — just Mr. 
Carnegie. This is Us. 



LOOK V 

MR. ROCKEFELLER AND HIS RELIEF WORK 

A LITTLE while ago the Rockefeller Foundation had to 
borrow some money to tide over a place in its good 
work. 

Strictly speaking, the Rockefeller Foundation is not a Foun- 
dation at all. 

It is a benevolent Dividend or what might be called a kind of 
Preferred Stock of Good Works, in the regular Rockefeller 
business. 

I have no quarrel in particular with the Rockefeller Foun- 
dation. 

I am merely interested in wondering if the Hookworm and 
Dr. Carrel end of the Rockefeller business, the General Educa- 
tion Board end of the Rockefeller business, is as important to 
the country as the Colorado end. Whichever side is to blame, 
as long as there is a set battle and a fixed policy of battle be- 
tween Rockefeller employers and Rockefeller labourers in 
Colorado, would it not be better for Mr. Rockefeller to let the 
Hookworm three thousand miles away go for a while and 
settle down at home and see that the hate in his own employees 
is duly studied and duly attended to, and decide to do some- 
thing about hate? Hate, after all, is a good deal more dangerous 
in what it is doing to the world than Hookworm. Hate should 
be investigated. iVnd rage. Of course there is the rage of 
the public, too — no matter how unreasonable it is — to be in- 
vestigated and attended to. The Rockefeller Foundation 
feels, of course, that the people are wrong and thrashing about 
in vain. But why do the people rage and imagine a vain thing? 

141 



142 WE 

The same principle applies, too, to what the Rockefeller 
Foundation through Dr. Carrel is doing in studying and curing 
cancer in thousands of white mice, in transferring tissues, in 
moving over people's kidneys into other people's bodies. One 
wonders if it would not be better for the Rockefeller Founda- 
tion to hand over Dr. Carrel and his very expensive white 
mice to Henry Ford for a while, who has got the homely, reg- 
ular working-end of his business in such fine, smooth-running 
order that he can turn his back on it and neglect it and take a 
little time off for white mice— just as he does for birds — with- 
out laying waste a whole countryside and calling in the United 
States troops? 

I am as glad as anyone about what Dr. Carrel is doing with 
Mr. Rockefeller's money, but I do not think Mr. Rockefeller 
ought to be called on or ought to feel called upon with all his 
other left-over things he has got to get done in Colorado and 
that he thinks he cannot yet afford to do, to pay the bill for 
Dr. Carrel. Some free, competent millionaire who has solved 
the problem of efficiency in his business, who has got team- 
work to going so smoothly in his business that the business 
almost runs itself, should be asked to pay for Dr. Carrel and 
the white mice. Mr. Rockefeller should be relieved. 

I like to believe that if I wait a little the Rockefeller interests 
' themselves will be saying in effect these things that I am saying 
in this chapter.* I like to believe that the American people are 
not on one side and the Rockefeller interests on the other per- 
manently, but the Rockefeller interests have not said anything 
yet about how much to blame they feel for the riots at Bayonne, 
New Jersey, and the country is not in a position to wait. The 
fate of America and the fate of the world hang like a thread 
to-day in our nation, like every other nation, on peace between 
capital and labour. I would rather wait; it would mean so 
much more for the Rockefellers to say it than for me to say it. 

' *Note. This chapter was written in March, 1915. See later chapters for de- 
velopments. 



MR. ROCKEFELLER AND HIS RELIEF WORK 143 

But, in the meantime, as long as I still fail to hear in the 
present crisis of the world our great fortunes in America taking 
a humble, inquiring tone toward the people, expressing their 
sorrow and desire toward them, someone will have to do it for 
them. We have seven thousand armoured millionaires in 
America. A book on preparedness for America and on what 
the people of America are to do for the peace of the world must 
first determine what the people are going to do with their seven 
thousand armoured millionaires. 



LOOK VI 

SEVEN THOUSAND ARMOURED MILLIONAIRES 

I 

HOW TO KNOW AN ARMOURED MILLIONAIRE WHEN 

ONE SEES ONE 

^N ARMOURED millionaire is a millionaire who in 
r\ the present curious fight between capital and labour 
decides that he has the right to choose the weapon. 
The weapon of being right, and of being obliged to be right, 
being rather cumbersome at times, he decides that the weapon 
shall be money. Then he stands up and fights with money in 
his hand the man who has no money in his hand. Of course it 
has not been supposed until lately that there is anything es- 
pecially unfair in this. Thousands of people are already saying 
it is unfair in private, but the United States Government has 
never mentioned it. 

When an armoured millionaire's labourer tries to fight him 
with some other form of main force or violence than money, the 
armoured millionaire asks the State to protect him from the 
labourer's violence, and goes on using his. This sounds queer, 
but it is true. 

In this country, if you get your way with a man by hitting 
him, you are arrested. If you get your way with him by starv- 
ing him, the State stands by you and protects you with troops 
while you do it. 

You look so dignified and respectable while you are doing 
it, and the man who is hitting looks so wild, that the Govern- 

144 



TO KNOW AN ARMOURED MILLIONAIRE 145 

ment, which goes (hke all governments) by appearances mostly, 
has not quite thought it out yet. x\ll you have to do if you 
want to get your way with a man, right or wrong, is to take 
away from him the machine he gets his hving with, and look 
dignified. 

This makes you an armoured millionaire. 

As a form of violence getting one's way with a man by starv- 
ing him to death seems so much more thorough to some of us 
than hitting him in the stomach, or hitting the outside of his 
stomach, that we cannot help feeling that the Government 
ought to see to it and have some regular arrangement for see- 
ing to it that an employer is hopelessly in the right before he is 
allowed to do it. Ought an employer, whether he is right or 
wrong toward a man, to be allowed indiscriminately and as a 
matter of course to take away from the man the machine he 
gets his living with.'' 

Perhaps this is one of the questions that the Rockefeller 
Foundation of Industrial Investigation will look into. 

In the meantime an armoured millionaire is a millionaire 
who says that he owns the machine the man is getting his 
living with and that what he does with what he owns is his busi- 
ness and that the Government, the public and the man whose life 
is chained up with the machine, have no right to question or 
authority to stop his running his business as if it were his. 

An armoured millionaire is a millionaire who drops the weapon 
of being right and of being obliged to be right and of being 
obliged to seem right to others, and uses money instead. 

Of course there are many milder types of armoured mil- 
lionaire, but any man who against his will or otherwise uses 
money to compete with his employees instead of to cooperate 
with them, or who uses his control of the money in the markets 
for the purpose of subduing the consumer instead of cooperating 
with him, may be defined as an armoured millionaire. 

Any millionaire who makes all the money he can, who is 
interested in doing an insipid, humdrum and comparatively 



UO WE 

unpowerful thing like making all the money he can, is probably 

an armoured millionaire. 

Any millionaire who reduces prices only when he has to and 
raises wages as little as he dares is an armoured millionaire. 

He fights by keeping labour helpless instead of by daring to 
make it strong. 



We cannot all of us get interested in the beautiful thoughts 
of armoured millionaires about peace between nations. 

There are hundreds of our millionaires in America who do 
not want to be armoured millionaires. They feel a little like 
the great nations of Europe. They would not be armoured 
millionaires if they could help it. 

But they are in a system, and only a few of them have the 
courage or the originality to break their way out — disarm them- 
selves with their men and with the public. 

The other millionaires are armoured, and so they are. 

Daily I think of them and wonder about them. 

Daily I see them everywhere on the high seas of the world, 
floating about, these magnificent engines of destruction America 
has invented that we call millionaires, none of them really 
wanting to destroy anything, or to threaten anybody, and yet 
all armed, all over, and all doing it. Anyone who looks about 
can see for himself how it is. Our millionaires are being largely 
operated just now as dreadnoughts at one end and hospital 
ships at the other. Guns in front and education boards aft. 
There is a fleet of nearly seven thousand of them. It is quite 
grim and splendid to think of them, to see them daily, nightly, 
floating about— all these stately terrible piles of steel and hu- 
iiifuiity, of lyddite and love! They make some of the rest of 
us in civilization feel like little boys in skiffs bobbing about in 
the open sea. But we are used to them and a little hardened 
to them now. Daily we see them go thundering, foaming, and 
streaking past us— all the dear gentle-hearted dreadnoughts 



TO KNOW AN ARMOURED MILLIONAIRE 147 

saying "God damn you!" in front, and "God bless you!" be- 
hind. 

I would like to show in the next few chapters, if I may, that 
there is nothing practical left for an armoured millionaire to 
do just now but to plug up his guns and say, "God bless you!" 
very plainly and very loudly at both ends. The day has gone 
by when the world is proud and grateful to get a "God bless 
you!" at one end. And so when I see education boards, hook- 
worm cures and beatitudes issuing gently from the hind end of 
dreadnoughts, I am filled with thoughts too deep for words. 
It does not seem as if I could bear to stand by and see seven 
thousand millionaires go on in this innocent, unconscious way 
any longer. 



II 

HOW AN ARMOURED MILLIONAIRE CAN KNOW 

HIMSELF 

The proper form for a letter from a benevolent person in- 
dulging himself in a fit of benevolence would be something like 
this: 

My Dear Sir : 

I am in great need of some good safe place to put two mil- 
lion dollars where I will do less harm with it than I did with it 
while I was getting it, and less harm than I am likely to do 
with it if I spend it on my children or myself. One million 
dollars of it has been presented to me by workmen whose 
wages I wouldn't raise because I was afraid of being called a 
traitor to my class and of being abused like Henry Ford. The 
other million came from customers that I charged as much more 
than I needed to as I dared. 

I wish you would help me out. 

I don't see any really graceful way of giving it straight back 
to my workmen or to my customers, which is what I would 
like to do, and I am too old now and too set in my habit of 
making more money than I want, to turn around suddenly and 
invest it in my own business — i. e., in some experiments in 
pulling it together and making it competent — so that my super- 
intendents and workmen will take time to have brains about 
one another, to understand each other and do team-work to- 
gether, and make me the head of a business my country would 
be grateful for and proud and could face all nations with. 

Now, you see what I am up against is to find a way of get- 
tmg rid of my customers' and workmen's money, in some quar- 
ter where my workmen and customers won't particularly hear 
about, and where nobody will suspect what a plight I am in, 
and where the people who get it will be grateful and put me i» 

148 



THE MILLIONAIRE WHO KNOWS HIMSELF 149 

a stained-glass window. I want to do something with it in 
some place where I can keep fooled about myself and where I 
can keep enough other people fooled to be happy. 

Now, can you not help me out about this.^ Will you not 
accept from me this two million dollars — without particularly 
inquiring how I got it, or whose it is — one half of the sum to 
be spent on fans and lorgnettes and female education in the 
Cannibal Islands, and the other in investigating the effects of 
fans and lorgnettes on civilization and how they lead or do not 
lead (with proper endowment) to clothes and vegetarianism.^ 

I beg you not to put me off in this matter and to let me hear 
at your earliest possible convenience what you think you can 
do for me. 

Humbly, gratefully and thanking you in advance, believe me. 

Most faithfully yours. 

Of course a frank letter from an armoured millionaire of the 
first class — a Super-Dreadnought — would not really make out 
loud and to other people such admissions as this. 

But there are very few Super-Dreadnoughts left, and I al- 
ready know not a few regular, orthodox, but wistful dread- 
noughts who practically make such admission to themselves. 
They have caught up the idea in the air and from the thoughts 
of the people. 

The way to help hospitals and poorhouses is to cut off their 
supply of patients and make them smaller. 

And any help these smaller hospitals and soup-houses may 
require should come from men who can afford to give it, and not 
from men who need their capital for reorganizing their own 
business and putting it on a competent, prosperity-sharing, pov- 
erty-curing peace basis. 

When this is done, there will be more money free in this coun- 
try for general education boards than ever has been dreamed of 
before. 



Ill 

THE HARDSHIPS OF DOING GOOD 

The best way for a country to get rid of benevolent people is 
to make being benevolent, or, rather, having a noble benevolent 
look, harder. 

The next thing the world has to do is to make being benevolent 
harder than being poor. 

When benevolent people begin to study how to get out of 
being benevolent, poverty will cease. 

If this country can get rid of benevolence it will soon be rid of 
poverty. 

The proper control of benevolence in a nation like ours is to 
be brought about, I imagine, not so much by legislation — which 
is largely a form of force — as by a great, national, omnipresent, 
ceaseless campaign of seeing through people and of turning on 
so much light in the countrj^ at large that benevolent people 
will even see through themselves. 

They already do — thousands of them. 

The country is already honeycombed with reformed benevo- 
lent persons, with fine arrested philanthropists, who have seen 
through themselves in time. 

The more extreme cases of benevolence with which the public 
has to deal, the men who have more momentum in being super- 
ficial, whose attention cannot be arrested easily, are only going 
to be reformed by making the hardships of being benevolent in 
America so great very soon now that nobody will dare to indulge 
m it, that everybody will be seen going back and hunting 
around in his own business for some plain, homely way of avoid- 
mg the terrors in a country like this of being a benevolent person 

150 



THE HARDSHIPS OF DOING GOOD 151 

— some way of getting out of helping people and giving them a 
chance to help themselves. 

I would like to add in this chapter, if I can, a little to the 
terrors of being benevolent. 

It is only fair to the men who may still contemplate being 
benevolent to call attention to the plight in which Mr. Rocke- 
feller and Mr. Carnegie have found themselves, to the way they 
have been cornered in their own good works. I find myself 
often thinking of them- — of Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Carnegie — 
looking wistfully over to them, watching them during their last 
days wandering as in some vast, lonely, windowless place, away 
from us all and away from all modern life, and wandering about, 
just going round and round in a kind of hollow glare or glistening 
— the way they have to now, day after day, in a kind of crystal 
maze of mirrors of their own goodness — trying to get out, not 
seeing how to get out, not really seeing anything, not under- 
standing anybody, and all the time spending millions of dollars a 
year on not seeing anything harder and on not understanding 
anybody more, and on keeping quietly out of touch with the real 
daily lives and hearts of men. 

Perhaps they have never really had a half a chance for any- 
thing better. Any man who makes so bold in the first quarter 
of the twentieth century as to start out on a course of being be- 
nevolent to it could hardly hope not to get more superficial than 
other people — more lonesome, more unpractical — one million dol- 
lars' worth more, every million dollars he gives away. 

Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Carnegie should not be judged with 
harshness. They are just engaged in going through the motions 
of being in the last generation. Other people are engaged in 
these same worthy motions, too. But Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. 
Carnegie do it so expensively and prominently that they have 
become a national concern and an intimate personal problem for 
all of us. 

Of course any little thing anyone can do to point out their 
hardships in advance to the other possible seven thousand mil- 



152 WE 

lionaires who may be this very moment before our eyes stum- 
bhng thoughtlessly into a bog of good works ought to be attended 
to at once. 

Every man of us has a chance now to think it out for himself 
and see how it really is in 1916. 

A man who is attempting to be benevolent in 1916 is attempt- 
ing the impossible. 

I would like to develop this idea. I am not going to claim 
that benevolence is wrong. I am not judging anyone. I am 
interested in showing how benevolence does not work. 



IV 
THE HARDSHIPS OF BEING DONE GOOD TO OR AT 

The plain fact seems to be that armoured milhonaires cannot 
hope not to have a dangerous influence on the world, as long as 
they insist on butting in late in life and giving us their ideas 
of the True, the Beautiful and the Good. 

They do less harm in the True — in investigation — because 
they feel more modest toward science and let their investigators 
and scientific men have more freedom. 

It is in their ideas of the Beautiful and the Good that they do 
harm. 

The ideas of the Beautiful and the Good coming from a 
dreadnought working backward, from a dreadnought merely 
working its main idea laboriously and hopefully other-end- to, 
are at least of somewhat mixed value. 

The difficulty with a poor helpless million dollars that be- 
longs to an armoured millionaire is that it is shut in with him and 
cannot get out. 

The million dollars itself is well enough and may be trying to 
be beautiful very hard. 

But of course as long as the million dollars is shut up with the 
man that it had to be got by, it has no chance. 

The million dollars has to have his temperament. And it is 
only to the people and to the ideas his temperament is capable 
of choosing that the million dollars can ever hope to get away. 

A man who plans the spiritual influences of his life toward 
society to be all sewer at one end and Poland Water at the other 
is almost sure to be mixed at times and to mix everybody who 
tries to help him. Everybody is already seeing this. There is 

153 



154 WE 

no really thorough honest way of sterilizing money by giving it a 
lurch over to the Beautiful and the Good. Little impurities in 
business come out as a hundredfold impurities in the Beautiful 
and the Good. 

One of the good things about Pierpont Morgan was that he 
knew he could not off-hand, all in one gesture, in one generation 
or so, create or discover or decide on the Beautiful. So he col- 
lected things that had had several hundred or several thousand 
years spent on them by millions of people all busy and happy, 
generation after generation, working on them and understanding 
them and discovering that they were beautiful before Mr. Mor- 
gan did. Mr. Morgan always used his money reverently — a 
little distantly — to tag the Beautiful. If Mr. Morgan had taken 
the Beautiful by the hand as Mr. Carnegie has, and had tried to 
lead it, if he had told religion and art and culture every year, 
millions of dollars' worth of what he thought they ought to be 
like — in other words, if Mr. Morgan had caught up live people 
instead of perfectly safe finished-off dead ones, it would be a 
national necessity to call attention to what he was doing with us. 
Taking up the live people of a nation, putting them all squirming 
and helpless into museums before their own eyes, is one thing, 
and doing the same thing with dead ones that would be highly 
pleased if they knew it, is another. Appropriating for a few 
paltry million dollars the great spiritual centres of the cities and 
the nation, the colleges and the libraries, as Mr. Carnegie has 
done, is a threat of benevolence that had never been dreamed of 
before. 

One of the things we propose to arrange for in this present 
crisis of our nation is that it shall never be dreamed of again. 
Here is Mr. Rockefeller for instance, already beginning (with 
practically no one to stop him) in the same bland way. He 
testified the other day before the National Commission: 

"The Rockefeller Foundation was a development in an im- 
personal form of my own personal plans of giving followed for 
many years.'* 



THE HARDSHIPS OF BEING DONE GOOD AT 155 

That is just it. Does the nation want or does it not want four 
hundred milHon dollars' worth of John D. Rockefeller going on 
and on after him, forever? 

Possibly, after all, one Rockefeller is enough. Possibly one 
million dollars' worth of him would be enough. One hundred 
million dollars' worth of two thousand John D. Rockefellers, gen- 
eration after generation, leading this nation gently along down 
through history, is a thought this nation will have to think out. 

There are people who would not want God Himself endowed 
in this way. They would say that if He needed it he would not 
be a Living God. In the minds of these people, of course, Mr. 
Rockefeller in his rough simple-minded way is ambitious. 

There was a widow once in who lost her baby, born 

shortly after her husband's death. She was inconsolable, and 
had the body of the child placed in plaster. She had an image 
made from the cast, life-size with pink cheeks. Then she tried 
to make her child live forever in her own parlour. This is the 
way that the average millionaire thinks or seems to think he can 
do with his fortune. He cannot stay with us here any longer, 
and he is sorry for us. So he has a foundation. 

It is all naive and natural enough, but the rest of us and our 
children's children must be told the truth. 

It does not matter who he is. 

A man who tries to keep himself intact after he is dead, in 
a great fortune, is a mummy. He may be a very nice one, but 
his fortune is merely his own body veneered over. He ought to 
die decently like other people, many people think, and not try 
to leave himself around. They did these things better in Pha- 
raoh's time. They used the pyramids for them. The pyramids 
were safe places. They were not colleges thronged with young 
people. 



Very rich men have so very little liberty of thought and are so 
handicapped by what might be called the spiritual economies 



156 WE 

and privations, to which they have seemed to think it was neces- 
sary to subject themselves in making their money, that they 
should be allowed by the public very little liberty of directing 
the thoughts of the young. All they can do is to make their 
spiritual privations immortal, and make what they got along 
without — everybody's. 

We do not mind in America having our millionaires around 
everywhere collecting yesterday's porcelains. What we mind 
is their idea of collecting yesterday's ideas. 

Yesterday's porcelains are not dangerous in America. Yes- 
terday's ideas are. 

The last thing we want in this country are foundations placed 
under Mr. Rockefeller's ideas. What we want is precisely the 
opposite. Mr. Rockefeller's poor, helpless money piled up in 
front of this nation, if it wants to live, or if it wants to get live 
people to take it seriously, needs our ideas more than our ideas 
need his money. 

Our ideas are as seeds and as mighty roots. Money could 
not create them. All it can do is to manure them. It should 
not be called, up over the door of 26 Broadway, "Rockefeller 
Foundation." It should be called "Rockefeller Fertilizer." 

Then the nation would be proud of 26 Broadway. 

And in the same way, what we want from Mr. Carnegie is 
not Mr. Carnegie's seed-thoughts, but perfectly quiet and kept- 
in-the-background, modest, helpful Manure. 



Of course a great foundation is not apt to do wrong actively. 
The wrong it does, it does negatively and by displacement— by 
letting the dead without knowing it, silently, grandly and 
munificently elbow the living out of their lives. 

As I have gone by in trains for years, I have always seen the 
dead and watched the dead up on the hills in New England. 
Everywhere I go, I see them— the apple orchards and the dead! 

I look out of my window in the train, and see a cemetery, and 



THE HARDSHIPS OF BEING DONE GOOD AT 157 

I know in a second — a few telegraph poles more — I shall be see- 
ing a nursery or a stonecutter's yard. There seem to be two 
things that go naturally with fields of dead people. One is 
monuments and stoneworkers, and the other is young trees and 
growing flowers, hothouses, fields of seeds and roots and 
bulbs. 

I would like to believe the sign up over 26 Broadway is going 
to be changed in a few years from now. 

But in the meantime the very word Foundation is in itself 
a self-criticism, an autobiography of what is the matter. 

The other day as I went by and looked up at 26 Broadway 
I thought of a sign that would go one better than Rockefeller 
Fertilizer. I thought what a great thing it would be for the 
world if the sign they put up there was "Rockefeller Roots 
and Bulbs." 



If I were to pick out one precise and unexceptionable model 
both in its method and in its results of what I think a Foun- 
dation ought to do, it would be what the Rockefeller Founda- 
tion has done in removing the hookworm in the South. 

If the same scientific spirit and honest fearlessness and 
thoroughness that was employed by the Rockefeller Foundation 
in dealing with the poor innocent hookworm were to be applied 
to the economic and social diseases of human beings, I would 
not be adding or trying to add, as I am in this chapter, to the 
hardships of being benevolent in this country. 

The moment the Rockefeller Foundation does something 
outright, something relentless with itself, the moment I see it 
employing some scientific, plain, surgical, ruthless laboratory 
thinker who will work for the sickness in people's minds and 
souls with the same ruthlessness and impartiality with which 
Dr. Carrel is working for the sickness in their intestines, these 
chapters in which I am trying to front up the will, the con- 
science and the command of the American people toward men 



158 ^VE 

who have cornered themselves and cornered us in great wealth 
will be out of date. 

There is a deeper question than cancer John D. Rockefeller's 
dead money must face. It must face the thousands of idle 
and luxurious men and women on the avenue and in the parks 
— and the millions of machine-minded, listless men and women 
slaving to keep them idle, grinding to keep them luxurious, in 
mines and shops, and in vast wildernesses of mean streets. 

I would like to see John D. Rockefeller spend his money in 
experiments in making people rather like to live, in keeping in 
our machine civilization the lives of our boys and girls from 
being bored — experiments in keeping men and women over 
forty, as they grind round and round their years without ideals, 
without expectations, from wishing that they were dead. 

The big experiments of the Rockefeller Institute should be 
experiments like Henry Ford's in factory education. 

I would like to think that instead of merely experimenting 
with white mice — with kidneys of poor dear people who pos- 
sibly would rather not live — the Rockefeller Foundation will 
soon retrieve itself by making experiments in making people 
want to live, in making a few million people in America stop 
wondering why they were born. 

Perhaps, after all, it is not cancers in people the Rockefeller 
Foundation should look out for next. It is souls. Cancers 
may be a safe, conservative, unexceptionable and very proper 
subject to experiment on, of course, in people who are doomed 
to listlessness and who are going to hell. 

But going to hell without a cancer is, when all is said, only 
a slight improvement. Why not be bolder, and try a few ex- 
periments in not going to hell.? 



The main road to hell is paved with being bored. All other 
roads are branch roads or feeders— as compared with being 
bored. 



FOUNDATIONS AND YOUNG MEN 

The specific thing that the world is demanding of a great for- 
tune to-day is that it should discover, one after the other, sam- 
ple things and do sample things that all of the rest of the world 
will rush to do the moment one sample or one working model 
has been shown to them. When the Rockefeller Foundation 
started the hookworm cure, paid for advertising it until other 
people wanted to advertise it, too, and until the people and the 
Government took it up, it was doing precisely the type of thing 
that the world demands that foundations shall do. What a 
great foundation is for is to take up and try out an idea which 
thousands of us think is unpractical, prove that it is imprac- 
tical so that we can stop wasting our time on it and drop it, 
or prove that it is practical so that instead of wasting our time 
in fighting it we can put in our time in carrying it through. 

It is precisely the daring, commanding, and original ideas, 
the not quite safe and not yet quite sterilized ideas — the ideas 
on which foundations alone could hope to afford to run risks 
which the American people want the Rockefeller Foundation 
to take up. The very least we expect of foundations is that 
they shall make us see new things. If a foundation merely 
thinks of things and does things that crowds of other people 
would think of and do if they had the money, it might as well 
not be a foundation at all. 

This particularly applies to having America educated by 
Mr. Rockefeller and to having such education as we have al- 
ready and every day want less of, multiplied by Mr. Rocke- 
feller. 

1.59 



160 WE 

Money that is deaf to people, to the interests of people, of 
vast classes and tracts of people, when it is being made is in- 
herently deaf to them when it is being spent. 

I have tried to state plainly the natural law that money that 
is deaf when it is being made — money that is born deaf — is 
always deaf. 

It selects deaf people to spend it. 

The men who administer the Rockefeller Foundation cannot 
but be — however blurred and smoothed over — the wrong men, 
the taggers and not the builders of a civilization. They will 
be like all superficial or benevolent persons, inferior to the big, 
creative men in business who are educating people, giving them 
a chance all day to be themselves. Uncreative millionaires 
prefer to have uncreative educators. They instinctively pick 
out men who look as if they had ideas instead of men who are 
in the act of having them. 

The other day in the University of Pennsylvania Scott 
Nearing — one of the most notable and powerful and stimulating 
teachers the university has had for years — was dismissed with 
a week's notice by the trustees because — as everybody testi- 
fied, his friends and foes alike — he was a teacher who was 
always being caught in the act of thinking and of making stu- 
dents think. Mr. Scott Nearing was dismissed because the 
men who were paying out their money to Pennsylvania Uni- 
versity with the general idea of making it an educational in- 
stitution threatened to withdraw their money if it (with men 
like Scott Nearing to help) kept on becoming one. 

I understand that Scott Nearing is a socialist. 

I am devoting my entire life to conceiving, expressing, adver- 
tising, illustrating and getting dramatized and getting crowded 
into the business of the country — a substitute for socialism. 

I am as anxious to avoid socialism for this country and the 
world as the Pennsylvania millionaires are. 

My difference I would record with them is twofold. 

First. I do not see how a university can possibly call itself 



FOUNDATIONS AND YOUNG MEN 161 

a university unless it has every main point of view on living 
subjects ably and enthusiastically represented by a professor to 
its students. 

Second. The best way to oppose class-war socialism is to 
have all young men in this country, especially the young new 
millionaires, deeply interested and skilfully acquainted with 
everything that socialists want and with the way they propose 
to get it. 

A university conducted in this spirit of meeting and of not 
being afraid to meet either the truth or a lie halfway would 
soon have such a powerful body of alumni scattered through the 
country, men of such shrewdness and knowledge of human 
nature, such width of sympathy and such wealth as in the new 
generation can only go with width of sympathy, that the finances 
of the university would take care of themselves and that the 
students and the faculty and the trustees and even the public 
every time they thought of Pennsylvania University or of 
sending their sons there would look upon its renown with pride 
instead of sorrow, and the University would not be as it is to-day 
placed in a position where it would look as if it were trying not 
to be any more of an educational institution than could be 
helped. 



There are a thousand indications in America at the present 
moment of a new and effectively rebellious spirit among our 
people and among our professors themselves against the fail- 
ure that American millionaires have made and are automatically 
bound to make, in trying to run the education of the American 
people with the money they have taken out of our pockets. 

We are all asking questions and facing facts. We already 
quite generally see as a people that men who make their money 
by separating the spirit from the body and by separating their 
souls from the way they conduct the relations of their daily 
lives are inherently bound to put forward and make prominent 



162 WE 

in colleges men of comparatively safe and wooden and derived 
and imitative intellectual life as professors and as presidents. 

The people of America of all classes are no longer patient 
with this state of affairs. 

We are not going to take endowments for education seriously 
in America which are not and which cannot be seen daily and in 
everybody's eyes any day in the act of educating, stirring up 
and keeping alive and telling news to the people. 

The educational value of the large soggy Foundation Mr. 
Rockefeller has thrust upon the American people has already 
quite largely confined itself to the people's showing that they 
do not want it, or at least that if they have to have it they will 
only take it when the ideas that made the money and the kind 
of professors that naturally infest large soggy lumps of money — 
have been plainly and loudly left out. 

We are full of questions that we cannot but keep asking. 

Why should we bother with Mr. Rockefeller's ideas and ap- 
pointments for our education? 

In a country like America why should derived men — men who 
speak in awed whispers of the conventions of academic thought, 
men who are helplessly respectable, starched up to their souls' 
eyes in what other people think, men who are cowed by their 
own Prince Albert coats, men who are slaves to their own silk 
hats, butlers as long as they live to the monuments they hope 
to have when they are dead — why should we ask or be expected 
in America to ask what we want for civilization from these 
men? Why should I or any man be expected to get these 
men to see things, run to them, hopefully, eagerly, desperately, 
as if they were the see-ers of a vast new civilization, the builders 
of a nation, the experts and masters and engineers of touching 
the imagination of a people, and framing the design and lay- 
ing the foundations of a world? 

We deny their right. Let the money go back to the men 
who have the ideas — the creative eagerness and power. Let it 
be scattered in the streets, put in the pockets of consumers, 



^ FOUNDATIONS AND YOUNG MEN 163 

left on the doorsteps of old employees. ... It would do 
less harm. 

I am not without recognition of a certain value — as an ano- 
dyne in a nation — of anaemic respectability. But it must be 
kept poor. Its hands must be kept off the education of the 
young. All millionaires who endow intellectual anaemia — who 
help it to be impressive, who help it to keep up appearances, to 
mock our poor patient people with great pillars and cold hearts, 
with domes and nobodies — are enemies of the nation. They are 
making our great universities year by year, in spite of the new 
gusty youths that are fed to them, conventional — remote from 
life, from all intellectual passion, cloisters of a grave, mumbling 
nothingness — emasculated men-nunneries. While the univer- 
sities of Europe are recognized everywhere as hot-beds of new 
thought, even as the strongholds of revolution and the centres of 
the idealsof the people, we are having spenton us in America fabu- 
lous sums for supplying five hundred thousand boys with rubber- 
stamp education, rubber-stamp morals, and with a religion — 
well . . . they come out at the end mostly (if with any 
religion at all) with a pale, ladylike religion of intellectual pro- 
priety, all their dear little minds made up for them and laid care- 
fully out for them like spiritual flower-beds. 

And this is being done by seven thousand armoured million- 
aires and by the kind of men in their universities — in the huge 
personality- vacuums they dominate — they can bully, beg, or hire 
to help them. And even at their best, if they do what they try 
to do, they will make American culture look (as seen from 
Europe) one vast, interminable human prairie of Nicholas Mur- 
ray Butlers. 

x'Vnyone can find out how this is for himself. All he has to do 
is to ask any Frenchman or Englishman or German or Russian 
who comes over here how it affects him to stand before American 
Culture and gaze pensively at our vast prairie reaching away — 
of Nicholas Murray Butlers. 

In the nations of the older world which seem so effete to Pitts- 



164 WE 

burgh, to Bridgeport Connecticut, and to Grand Rapids Michi- 
gan, or to the milUonaires of Cleveland and New York — one is 
always seeing in the great universities, grave safe Governments 
walking about softly with a big club and listening and eaves- 
dropping for new ideas. 

If I could imagine our Government in Washington getting 
suspicious, coming up to Columbia, or hanging about the Yale 
Campus, or slinking around the Hai-vard Yard, for new ideas, to 
pounce on them and then to crush them out, and to hurry any 
boys away to jail who had been seen with a new idea, it would 
cheer my heart. 

And I do not think that I can be fairly set one side by my older 
readers in saying this — as a revolutionist. Every new idea in 
which I am interested or ever have been will be found on exami- 
nation to be mortised on to an old one as tight as an oak tree to 
its roots. 

It is not as a revolutionist that I am speaking as I do about our 
seven thousand armoured millionaires and the intellectually soft, 
effeminate, serene colleges they keep arranging for. 

I am speaking as a fellow human being, as a fellow citizen of 
America, and as a millionaire myself — as a man with several 
million dollars' worth of ideas — other people's as well as mine, 
for which I am acting as advertising agent in American life. 



VI 
ON BUTTING IN AFTER ONE IS DEAD 

I have merely desired in these last chapters to suggest in a 
shrewd civilization like ours the hardships of being benevolent. 
If possible I have hoped in a small way to make the hardships of 
being benevolent harder in America from now on than they have 
been before. 

I have not written these chapters for the express benefit of 
Mr. Rockefeller or even to say that in his day and generation 
there should not have been one. I have merely wished to help 
make provision for there not being another. 

We have learned that a fortune that does not say We with 
people, that does not educate all its employees and the public in 
peace while it is being made, is going to make very poor or dan- 
gerous work of saying We with people when it is being spent 
for them, or, as in the case of Mr. Rockefeller, spent at them. 

Men who have been essentially uncreative toward society in 
making their money are bound to pick out men who are un- 
creative toward society to spend it, who only think of superficial 
and imitative things. We have come to find that endowments, 
except by making almost violent or contradictory provision for 
their expenditure, are sterile. They are as barren women. 
Their children must be borne for them. 

In a new country and in a democracy like ours full of gusto and 
full of the love and expectation of freedom and of seK-expression, 
expressing dead people or having dead people all about us hiring 
our attention and expressing themselves to us does not appeal 
to us as a substitute for expressing ourselves. 

In the next fifty years the only possible power or prestige any 
rich man in America is going to be able to get will be through the 

165 



166 ^VE 

people he makes his money with and makes his money out of and 

what they say about him. 

We are no longer content to take back in a great lazy lump 
from a man at the end of his life the too-much money he did not 
know enough not to make, or that he could not see any way of 
sharing with us or of letting us keep while he was alive. 

We all know in America how to know a man now. We know 
we never know a man, John D. Rockefeller or any other, until we 
have narrowed him down to the way he makes his money. 

We know that a man's courage, faith, his true sense of values 
in things and in men — everything important one may care to 
learn about him — his foresight, patience, originality — are all 
best and most precisely known by the men who have business 
dealings with him. His very ledgers, his expense day-book 
taken out of his pocket and filled in a little between the lines, 
would make a better autobiography of almost any man in Amer- 
ica, of his characteristic failings, sacrifices, nobilities, than any- 
thing he could ever hope to write. 

While they might not say so in so many words, the real reason 
many sterling men in America despise parlours and teas, is that 
they have found that buying and selling with a man has more 
revelation in it, gives more real spiritual communion with him 
— with his real soul — than almost anything else. They have 
learned a dollar cuts deeper than a teacup or a smile. 

Most of us have had it proved to us that all the faults a man 
lias in making his money, multiply a hundredfold in spending it. 

A man who expresses his worst self in making his money has 
no chance to express a better self in a foundation. As a man 
always expresses his real self in the way he makes his money, he 
has already expressed himself, and he will have to let it stand at 
that. Any little good he may squirm in afterward with a foun- 
dation is to express other people. 

The only way to express these other people with one's money 
IS to give it to them outright, without a condition and without 
any advice, and let them express themselves with it themselves. 



VII 
ON BEING A FATHER FOREVER 

I am not sorting out good and bad people and casting especial 
blame on Mr. Rockefeller any more than I have on Mr. Car- 
negie. 

I am dealing with Mr. Rockefeller's career as a part of the 
geology of business. He is a part of the phenomena of his period. 
I am merely pointing out that for the purposes of our present pe- 
riod, we must all of us, young and old, rich and poor — look upon 
Mr. Rockefeller thoughtfully as an Ichthyosaurus. He should 
be mounted as an Ichthyosaurus and studied by the people in 
our Social Museum. As long as he keeps this humble position, 
I wish to give him due credit as a part of the world's necessary 
experience in seeing its way, in ethicalizing and socializing the 
every-day life of our people, but the moment he gets down and 
begins running around and running the lives of the rest of us, 
building his skeleton into our civilization instead of letting us 
grow ours, I am compelled to cut down through conventions and 
appearances and try to speak out as well as I may the new heart, 
the new conscience and the new hope of my people. 

The trust — or cooperation machine — was a great splendid dis- 
covery even in its rudimentary form of merely inventing co- 
operation between manufacturers and leaving the employees and 
the people out. It is credit enough to Mr. Rockefeller to have 
invented this. 

It is not the Mr. Rockefeller of the past but the Mr. Rocke- 
feller of the future I am obliged to look upon with critical regard. 

The first moment I see him climbing back on to his frame (like 
that huge seventy-foot, thousand-legged, splendid Giganteous 

167 



168 WE 

Diplodicus in the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh) I will be seen 
going by with all the populace and looking up to him and doing 
homage to him. But to have such a thing perfectly free and 
rushing around loose in America, bumping into and bowling over 
our young new millionaires, arouses in me — as anyone can see — 
feelings too deep for words. 

Mr. Rockefeller himself (who once grant him his point of view 
has always had a kind of courage and bigness in carrying things 
through) has better hopes for the young new millionaire or for 
his own son than that he should be a mere replica of himself. He 
will be sorry not to let the young new millionaires of to-day be as 
new in their generation as for a little while Mr. Rockefeller was 
in his. And to the young millionaire to-day being a new million- 
aire is already seen to mean seeing through one's self, seeing that 
men who separate the spirit from the body in making their money 
cannot but separate the spirit from the body in spending it. 
Every dollar they spend splits and spreads apart and leaves 
helpless and weak — our civilization. 

As the trust was a great invention, and as Mr. Rockefeller did 
not finish it, we are now finishing it for him, and he must leave us 
alone or hand his money over to us, blank, stringless and as little 
like him as possible, and let us express with his money our differ- 
ence with him — our improvements and repairs and new spiritual 
and moral and social patents on his own valuable but stupen- 
dously unfinished, original business machine. 

Only a world can finish such a big idea as Rockefeller's, any- 
way. Why should he not, without conditions, hand it over to us 
and let us do it.? One Rockefeller was enough for Rockefeller's 
money. It needs other people. It needs especially people who 
will take back or supplement with Mr. Rockefeller's money, Mr. 
Rockefeller's ideas. 



The typical millionaire is not content with making a career for 
himself. Unless he stops to think, and has times of being a phi- 



ON BEING A FATHER FOREVER 169 

losopher as well as an artist and man of action, he is a little apt to 
treat the members of his family as especially distinguished and 
elegant domestic animals. He wants to pick out careers for 
them. 

He overlooks that it is the very core of a career to be picked 
out by the man who has to have it; and in the same way he is not 
content to take the important but modest and confined position 
of being the father of his children. He has a tendency to regard 
a family as a kind of highly spiritualized stock-farm. 

He seeks to control not only the ideas and ideals but affections 
and mating. 

He cannot keep from meddling. He cannot learn to step back 
and just be the grandfather of his grandchildren. He wants to 
be father and grandfather both. He likes the glory and power, 
the privileges and immunities of both positions. 

The typical American in distinction from the typical American 
millionaire feels that no father has a right to found more than one 
family. He feels that a father who tries to found his son's 
family is a public nuisance. He feels that if there is anything a 
true father ought to be proud of in a country like America it is a 
son who before his eyes and against his will hacks out a career 
for himself. Speaking generally in America if any wise shrewd 
father wanted to pick out of his five sons the best one to give the 
bulk of his fortune to, he would pick out the son who was most in- 
dependent of him. A son with even wilful vision of his own 
would seem more promising to him than one who had no vision 
of his own at all. 

This is a fact that Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller in seek- 
ing to perpetuate themselves in their money have overlooked. 
The present wholesale attempt on the part of two old men to 
grasp the lives of the unborn and live in them has become a 
national issue. It is an attempt to shove future generations 
one side, and it can only be dealt with by getting the two old 
men to see what it is they are really doing. If it is too late for 
them, it is not too late for others. We are soon going to see 



170 WE 

and see gladly that what men with special power are for is to per- 
petuate others and not themselves. Their money is to go forth 
rejoicing in the wills and ideals of others. Their money in other 
men will be what they were not and be what they would like 
to have been (if they had thought) and see what they had not 
seen, and fill out their lives for generations when they are dead. 

It will soon be taken as an axiom for wealth, for every foun- 
dation, that this is the specific thing it is for. A man's fortune 
shall return like the body of the man to that from which it came 
— it shall be scattered abroad to replenish the earth. 

John D. Rockefeller's fortune, precisely like his body, must be 
allowed a decent interment. 

Or to change the figure, all that a great fortune is for after a 
flourishing career (like any self-respecting vegetable) is to go to 
seed. Any asparagus bed, if Mr. Rockefeller would stand still 
over it and wonder about it a little while and look at it thought- 
fully, would tell him what to do with his money. 



VIII 

MR. ROCKEFELLER, THE PEOPLE AND NATIONAL 

DEFENCE 

A list of Mr. Rockefeller's religious, sociological, industrial 
antagonisms should be made out — a complete set of the con- 
victions of other people which Mr. Rockefeller did not under- 
stand. Each item on the list of Mr. Rockefeller's failures to 
understand should be checked off one by one and supplied in 
turn with an appropriation to get other people to understand 
them. The only way Mr. Rockefeller's money can save itself 
now — can keep from turning turtle after he is dead and from 
lying heavy, helpless, and flat on its back on top of the world 
and generally getting in everybody's way and littering up history 
with Mr. Rockefeller's mind — is to arrange categorically to. have 
it spent in ways of which Mr. Rockefeller would not approve. 

This principle holds good, no matter what the founder of a 
foundation is like. 

A fortune in any form is a vast concentration, a huge assault 
of one man's will upon the will of the world. When he dies, 
this man is to be regarded by America finally and conclusively 
as having had his turn. 

The idea that after he has been in hell three hundred years, 
or luxuriating around in heaven for three hundred years, he 
should still be allowed in a disguised, anonymous way to be 
runn'ng things here — is an idea which the world is about to 
dismiss forever. 



I am not in sympathy with Mr. Walsh's bloodhound pursuit 
of the Rockefeller fortune, nor am I in sympathy as a rule with 

171 



17^ WE 

the endeavour of the State to legislate from the outside mil- 
lionaires or any other people into being good. All that is nec- 
essary is to put one or two millionaires in show windows, have 
people all about them looking through and through them, and 
they will be good as a matter of course. 

Using force with millionaires works no better than with 
other men or nations. Millions of people all talking, shoving 
and threatening, throwing about bricks and legislatures, wildly 
and in the dark, will not have as much power with a millionaire 
as one man nobody notices over in a corner, groping around 
with his hand, who manages to find a switch and give it one 
little click. The minute a millionaire as a type finds himself 
standing out in a glare of having everybody see through him, 
he changes inside of his own accord. 

The way to control every man's life for a world — is not to let 
anybody live in the dark. 

It is all a matter of engineering attention, of attracting and 
holding and arranging in a world a proper pattern of attention. 

This is why I have hoped it might help a bit for the next fifty 
years to keep our millionaires exposed to this book — everybody 
taking the book any time they needed to, sighting a millionaire 
with it, and turning it on him. 

If there is enough light turned on we will not need force, and 
very little penal legislation, I think, for the miUionaire. We 
will say We with him and he will say We with us. 



IX 

MR. ROCKEFELLER AND THIS BOOK 

All war is based on deafness, and the only possible campaign 
for peace is to begin by getting the attention of deaf people at 
home who disregard the rights of others. 

I am trying to get the attention of this country to peace. 

This country is practically composed of workmen. 

I am saying to workmen that the way to get things is by 
saying We. 

The workmen — millions of them — think I am visionary. They 
point to their employers and the way their employers get things. 

They say their employers only get things out of labour by 
fighting their labour, and that labour can only get the atten- 
tion of capital by fighting capital. 

So the millionaires have locked the workmen away from me. 

They believe the millionaires instead of believing me. 

The employers are a huge advertisement for war. 

In the same way that capital with its armoured millionaires 
has locked millions of workmen away from me and is putting 
up a huge advertisement for war by getting things by lock- 
outs, labour is advertising war, too, and has locked away capi- 
talists from me. 

The strike is the great standard standing-advertisement for 
war. 

And it is a very good honest advertisement, too, plausible 
and difficult to disprove. 

Fighting works both ways. 

As long as the best way to get the attention of employers 
to workmen's interests is to threaten them or to hurt them or to 

173 



174 WE 

drive them out of business, and as long as millions of men are 
able to say that every new value, every new liberty, that has 
come to labour has come at first from fighting the employers, 
the people in the nation will have daily the war habit of mind 
Y7ith one another and the nation will have wars with other na- 
tions. As long as the rank and file of employers can plausibly 
maintain that the only way they can get and hold the atten- 
tion of labour is by the lockout or threat of a lockout, as long 
as the mass of labouring men believe that the only way to get 
the attention of an employer to the interests of labour is by 
the strike or threat of a strike, nations will have to have armies 
and navies to get each other's attention to their interests and 
their ideas and their culture and to be safe on the planet. 



Who are the men whose attention if it were got and got most 
practically without the use of force and by the use of peace, 
would advertise peace the most to the moi^t people the most 
hours every day, and the most days every year, and keep peace 
advertised and before people the most years of their lives? 

They are the big employers or millionaire employers. 

People notice them. If their attention is got by peace, they 
know it and all the people believe it, nine hours a day while 
they work. 

The best place — what almost might be called the official 
place for advertising peace to everybody to-day, is thus occu- 
pied by our modern millionaires or big employers. America 
can be best defended, and without a cent spent on guns or on sol- 
diers, by her seven thousand millionaires. 

They are in a position to so advertise peace to our people 
that nothing can make the people fight, and that there will be 
nothing about the people that could make anybody think of 
fighting them. 

All they have to do to advertise peace in this way and pro- 
tect the nation in this way is to be unarmoured millionaires. 



MR. ROCKEFELLER AND THIS BOOK 175 

The first day the people of this country see that the country 
is full of rich men and poor men who are getting things by peace 
and by saying We — full of people who have a national habit of 
saying We — the country will be safe. 

In the meantime, with seven thousand armoured million- 
aires fighting one half the people in a country, however much 
the country may talk about being peaceful and about getting 
things by peace, nobody will believe it and it will have to have 
a big army and navy to protect itself. 

Rockefeller and America's seven thousand armoured mil- 
lionaires may be looked upon to-day as America's huge "Want 
Ad" placarded across the world by the people of iVmerica. 
^'Wanted: More Henry Fords.'' We the American people are 
going to shift for ourselves and get out from under our seven 
thousand armoured millionaires, and by advertising what we 
want and what we are, we can do it. 

The first thing a foundation does to the men who are founding 
it and the men it is founded for seems to be to take them all up 
on a huge derrick or hoist. It lifts them up calmly in large 
stupid bulks or steam shovels of people and sets them soul and 
body off on one side in a safe empty place on the world where 
nothing can be made to happen to them and where all they can 
do is to try in a vague sleepy way to keep things from happening 
to other people. 

The reason I have devoted so much space to the inherent 
failings of foundations is that I want to clear the way for the 
next section of this book — the Art of Making Things Happen. 

The Art of Making Things Happen depends on getting peo- 
ple's attention. The effect of foundations on people who run 
them is to put them where nobody can get their attention. The 
effect of foundations on the people they are run for is to put 
people where nobody can get their attention and where they do 
not want their attention got. 



ACT II 

The Art of Making Things Happen 
Advertising a Nation 
Dramatizing Business 
The Science of Being Believed 
America and the World 
America, Germany and the World 



LOOK I 

THE ART OF MAKING THINGS HAPPEN 

I 
WHY THEY DON'T 

THE first thing I do sometimes when I arrive in New 
York is to step into a booth at the Grand Central Sta- 
tion and call up Plaza 6107. 

Plaza 6107, after my name has been properly filtered through 
two or three secretaries and things, speaks up sweetly, even 
promptly and gratefully, as if all the time in the world were at 
my disposal — as if I were a golf course, or as if I were a running 
brook or a mountain with the sun shining on it, or a yacht. I 
respond as well as I can of course (like all of these) and say 
where I dropped from. Then Plaza 6107 says to me suddenly 
and imperiously, and as if he thought I were fading dreamily 
away from the end of the wire and would all dissolve in a mist 
in a minute, ''Say, Lee ! Look ! Listen !'' 

There is not much to look at really. There are just those 
eleven little black holes in the transmitter, or there is the shelf 
in the corner of the booth, or I look at him with my mind's eye 
— at Plaza Number 6107 — sitting there as I had often seen him 
at his desk, whaling away with his voice on those innocent 
little eleven black holes and making somebody two miles away 
or two hundred miles away do what he wants them to. Say, 
Lee ! Look ! Listen ! Then he asks me what I can do and we 
make our appointment and hang up. 

I often think of it after it is all over. Why does he say: Lee ! 

177 



178 WE 

Look ! Listen /—aim a gun in that way at my attention, knock 
with one stentorian tone the whole United States off the wire and 
all New York, and command me to breathe, think, feel, act, and 
speak for thirty seconds as if there were nothing or could be 
nothing anywhere or ever in this world except that wire and Us — 
Him and Me — a kind of tunnel through New York of Him and 
Me — he at one end and I at the other. 

Well, whatever the reason may be it is just like him. If I or 
any of his friends or any of the people he does business with were 
to look round for three particular, graceful, fitting words that 
would make a nice, quiet, dignified, complete autobiography of 
him — Plaza 6107, three words that all who knew him would 
look at lovingly and gratefully on his tombstone as summing up 
his life, as his last will and testament to this heedless world, the 
words that would be carved there in large, beautiful letters after 
his name and after when he was born and when he died, would be 
— through all that silent cemetery, " Say ! Look ! Listen I " 

The other day as I went by Greenwood I looked at those dig- 
nified flocks of dead people up the hill beckoning to all those 
other crowds of people behind the windows in the trains all day 
and all night with their stony white fingers. I thought suddenly 
of Plaza 6107 and of how he and his autobiography in a kind of 
grim marble glory on that soft green slope up there would look, 
and how they would live on and on, saying to all New Rochelle, 
Bridgeport and New Haven and Boston flocking by, by day, by 
night : " Smj I Look ! Listen I " 

Then it occurred to me that there would not really need to be 
anything peculiar or exclusive about it— about Plaza Number 
6107's autobiography on his tombstone. It is what any truthful 
tombstone to-day would have to say about anybody. 

It is a typical American life. Any man in America who does 
anything or gets anything done by anybody else in this magnifi- 
cently heedless, massively absentminded century, could have 
his life summed up in these same beautiful, wistful, plaintive 
words. 



II 

HOW THEY MIGHT 

Bouck White, a little while ago, when he was going up the 
Avenue and saw some perfectly good attention in a church he 
was going by, which belonged to somebody else and which he 
thought was being wasted, strode swiftly into the church and 
stole it. He stole a whole audience-worth of attention in broad 
daylight in the busiest part of the day right in the middle of New 
York. 

He was arrested and sent to jail for it for six months. 

Attention right in the middle of New York which somebody 
has accumulated for years and got a lien on is worth many 
thousands of dollars a minute. Bouck White saw this attention 
as he was going by and wanted it for socialism. It was lying 
comparatively idle, it seemed to him, and not being used as 
vigorously or economically as he would use it, and he went in and 
stole it. The next morning all the newspapers in America — 
after he had stolen several thousand dollars' worth of the best 
and most powerful attention to be had anywhere — piled in and 
presented him handsomely and with their compliments, from 
Boston to San Francisco, with several hundred thousand dollars' 
worth more. 

Bouck White ought not to have stolen it, of course, and he took 
what he could never have earned, and he ought to have seen that 
it would not work to steal it, that it would only identify S9cialism 
quite unnecessarily with stolen goods, and of course while the 
whole raid turned out wrong for socialism and for Bouck White, 
the initial estimate that Bouck White made — that if he was 
going to do anything for socialism he would have to hustle 

179 



180 WE 

about and get some attention to do it with— was shrewd and 

right. 

Every inteUigent and effective man in our modern Hfe who is 
trying to do things is making a study of ways of breaking into 
banks or churches of attention and of breaking in in some way 
that all these people who are taking care of their precious souls 
in them will forgive him for and be glad for afterward. 

Anybody can break in and be turned out. What we are 
studying on, many of us, is how to break in and be asked to stay. 

Every enterprise stands or falls on its having or gathering 
around it to-day men who have a kind of genius of making 
people look and like to look — men who make looking catching. 

Everything civilization wants to have happen to-day turns on 
getting the attention of people who will attend to it and make it 
happen. 

The Ladies" Home Journal fences off one million women and 
says, "These are ours. You cannot get at them except you ask 
us. What do you want to say to them? " The Saturday Evening 
Post skims off two million men from the top of the country 
and says: "These are ours. You cannot get at them except 
you ask us. What do you want to say to them?" Mr. 
Robert Collier takes a few hundred thousand more. Mr. 
Hearst has huge cities listening. They also say, "These people 
are ours." 

Authors come and look over at them wistfully. "E you say 
what we want in just the way we want it said," they are told, 
"you may be paid ten cents a word." 

Very few authors slip away sadly. They elbow in and say 
anything. 

Every author, like every business man, soon comes to see how 
it is. There is just so much territory of attention, or area of 
possible listening, in this country in a year, and the publishers 
and editors stake it off between themselves. Each has his own 
comer plot of the spiritual real estate of the United States. It is 
the most profoundly real real estate there is. 



HOW THEY MIGHT 181 

I have been trying to get a few feet of it for seventeen years — 
room for a fruit-stall in the street of the world, or a booth to 
sell thoughts or seeds in — room in the public thought or pubhc 
attention for — what shall I call it? my cucumber frame of ideas, 
my experiment station, or what you will — my brooder or incu- 
bator of ideas — to make a civilization out of. 

The fact is that practically all the really agreeable ways of at- 
tracting people's attention to what is important to them are apt 
to get used up. One finds that they have made all their atten- 
tion arrangements themselves and have planned just what they 
propose to have their attention attracted to — and why — and 
who — and how long every day of the week from 7 a. m. to 11 :30 
at night. 

The specific thing they want of you and, in fact, of nearly 
everybody, is to leave their attention alone. 

Everybody is talking at once. Everybody is engaged in a 
imanimous uplift of not listening to anybody else all together. 
The most complete and successful team-work that is being done 
and done by all classes together is this stupendous and matchless 
feat of the twentieth century — of not letting anybody be heard. 



, in 

CONFESSIONS OF A MERELY IJTERARY MAN 

On a big iron gate, as I was just entering the Yale Campus 
yesterday, I saw this sign. I stopped and read it: 

All Peddlers, Second-hand Clothing Dealers, Book Agents, 
Solicitors for any kind of business, Newsboys, Bootblacks and 
all persons other than welcome visitors are hereby prohibited 
from entering these premises under the penalty of the law. 

"That means me," I said to myself. 

But I walked on. Nobody would know it meant me. People 
go by clothes mostly, and I slid through and wandered around 
under the elms and gazed at the statue of Nathan Hale, and read 
in the library, and sat on The Fence, and generally did as I 
liked. (To be accurate I did not strictly sit on The Fence. 
That would have been getting too much for nothing, considering 
who I was and knew I merely was, but I leaned against it re- 
spectfully.) 

In the library, as I was slipping about feeling a little guilty, of 
course, but comfortable and safe and anonymous, with all that 
intellectual grandeur around me, one of the librarians called me 
by name and asked if he could do anything for me. 

I got away in a minute. It made me vaguely unhappy. He 
wouldn't have wanted me there after all— not if he knew, I 
thought. In his heart of hearts he would side, if he knew, with 
that big sign on the gate. 

All Peddlers, Second-hand Clothing Dealers, Newsboys, Book 
Agents. ... 

182 



CONFESSIONS OF A LITERARY MAN 183 

I thought of it as I came back through the big gate. "That 
sign means you I " I said to myself. You know it. Yale College 
does not want a man like you, an unaccounted for, unclassified 
person, a kind of slicked-up outlaw or spiritual cowboy — a man 
with nobody back of him and without a license — just toting his 
own little ideas around — on the premises. 

I did not like to admit this about Yale College, or, rather, 
about me, whichever it is. But I'm afraid it is necessary. 

Take any man to-day who is trying to interpret or get before 
people what is new in his time and put him in the middle of the 
Yale Campus and let him try with his new little idea under his 
arm to ring one door-bell after the other on those great proud 
front doors of All Knowledge on the Yale Campus, and he would 
be taken for a book agent. Jim Donnelly would shoo him off. 

The question I would put to the reader to-day is this: How 
should a man who is by temperament an interrupter, and who 
has to be and expects to be shooed, feel and act while he is being 
shooed? In other words, w^hat is a good, practical, wearing phi- 
losophy for a book agent? We are all of us book agents in a way, 
those of us who are interested in ideas and in the world and in 
getting our ideas slid in. People are always taking us for book 
agents and shooing us. What would be a good philosophy for us 
to have before, during and after being shooed? 

Here is mine. I put down these rules for myself or for any- 
body for what they are worth. 

But before I go on to the rules, I want to record the main 
philosophic principle I placed before myself for the rules to start 
from. My advice to myself is like this: 

"Stop bothering about being a book agent and face the 
music," I say to myself plainly. "I am a book agent. It's all I 
ever was or ever will be. All I hope to be is a good one before I 
die. My business is peddling ideas that people know they do 
not want. I am spending and propose to spend my life in in- 
terrupting people, in breaking in w'th what good manners I have, 
or bad manners people may think I have, upon all institution- 



184 WE 

alized, comfortable people— people who have locked up the great 
bronze front doors of their important thoughts, pulled down the 
curtains, and who are sitting by the fire in the slippers of their 
minds. I might as well face the fact and get on with it as well as 
I can. Toward the life around me, toward the big severe for- 
bidding front door of my century I am a book agent at heart. 
And except that I do not propose (by anybody with an apron or a 
degree on) to be sent around to the back door, I have a book 
agent's soul. I pull the bell ! I hear it ringing through the halls 
without fear and with deep joy! Let them come on!" I say. 

Then door after door. 

Elijah was a book agent. 



Getting people to want ideas they do not want is like any 
other kind of salesmanship. All successful business, even all 
really successful religion, consists in interrupting people. As it 
is a matter of interest to nearly everybody — every fellow human 
being from a bootblack to a prophet — I have thought I would 
name two or three practical aids in the art of interrupting. 

(I would not want anybody to lay my book down just here at 
the end of this paragraph. It will be appreciated if the reader 
will not interrupt me until he has let me interrupt him for about 
twenty lines more to say what I think an interruption is.) 

The kind of interrupting in which I believe, and that I am 
writing about in this book, must conform to the following three 
rules : 

First. The thing that has to be got right first in an inter- 
ruption is its soul or spirit. The soul of an interruption is 
the way one feels toward people while one is interrupting them. 
One must wait before interrupting until one gets this feeling 
right. It should run as a kind of humming accompaniment or 
obligato underneath one's words while one is doing it. These 
people I am interrupting want to be interrupted. They merely 
don't know it and haven t mentioned it. 



CONFESSIONS OF A LITERARY MAN 185 

This is what may be called the soul of an interruption. An 
interruption that is without this feeling has not a soul, and all 
the bad things we think about it and say to it and throw after 
it, are good for it. 

This is why many strikes have failed. The strikes with 
souls go through. This is why Christianity has never been 
tried. Christians have not interrupted in a Christian spirit. 

Second. One has to believe in interrupting to know how to 
do it. It is a kind of religion. Every new value in this world 
is an interruption. To believe in interruption is to believe in 
the law of life. 

A young onion coming up in a field is an interruption. 

A new baby is an interruption. 

Third. One must take shooing and waiting as a matter of 
course. If it were not for the shooing, interrupting would not 
be an art, and if it were not for the waiting it would not be a 
religion. One must keep sensitive. Like any other salesman 
one must always hope one is not going to be shooed and never 
be surprised if one is. When one gets one's reward, one can 
enjoy it, and when one does not, one can enjoy thinking how one 
is going to enjoy it. One would like, for instance, to be let in 
with honours on the Yale Campus. I could not help thinking 
of this sadly as I walked slowly out at last past the great gate 
and past the book-agent sign the other day, on the Yale Col- 
lege Campus. The only way I could ever be got in on the Yale 
Campus would be as a Statue. 

A statue of a man who once had an idea is always in good 
form. 

Churches and colleges run to statues of men who have inter- 
rupted them. Bronze radicals and revolutionists in granite 
are much sought after and are seen everywhere in great glory 
in all the citadels and cathedrals of the Smooth and the Fin- 
ished and in the most massive fortresses of the unchangeable. 
Westminster Abbey has mobs of men who have interrupted 
it, men who have even said Pooh ! to it, standing around on the 



186 WE 

floor everywhere about the place perfectly at ease and in natural, 
graceful attitudes as if they had been born and brought up 
there. The Art of Getting iVttention may be an uncomfor- 
table art, but it is reassuring to consider that it is already being 
recognized. All life already reeks with faith in it. 



Attention is the drive-wheel of the world and of everything 
that goes in it. The department store originated in the fact 
that someone discovered that attention was valuable like money 
and should be saved. 

A store, for instance, which already has attention for dress 
goods can very easily give the attention it already has a neat 
little turn to shoes, and it does not have to go out into the street 
and work up an entirely fresh piece from the ground up. The 
Mail-Order House originated in the idea that attention in a 
catalogue when one was looking it through, was catching and 
full of cross-fertilization from one column to another. Human 
attention is not in columns or departments. Once get it and 
it is easier to make it slide over from poppies to pianos and 
baby carriages than it would be to get it again. The 
Mail-Order House has come into its own because it thought of 
this. 

The Trust originated apparently in the same way. It was 
an attention syndicate. The trusts say: *'We have all these 
millions of people listening to us on kerosene and on Hghting 
their houses. We might as well, when we have them in on*- 
hands like this, make soap and wash their hands for therr, 
brush their teeth for them, polish their shoes, comb their hair 
and lubricate and soothe and smooth away their meals." The 
Standard Oil was America's first great Attention Trust. Others 
have followed. 

Attention is getting to be a kind of radium. Anybody who 
can get some immediately is rich or so powerful he would not 
bother with riches. Once let a man get attention and there is 



CONFESSIONS OF A LITERARY MAN 187 

no stopping him or stopping the good or harm he can do to a 
world with a look or a nod or a whisper or by keeping silent. 

But the difficulties increase with the value. 

It is getting to be pathetically to the point — what Antony 
said to the Romans when he wanted to get their attention. He 
said he wished they would lend him their ears. This is just 
what he would say now. If there were some way of having 
people's ears adjustably made — some way of taking a man's 
ears off quietly, holding them firmly but kindly in one's hand, 
and in this way making a sure thing of talking into them, 
there is not a great work in the world from the coming of the 
kingdom of God to picking up papers in the streets that would 
not be attended to this week and promptly finished up. 

The reason that things do not get done is that people are so 
independent with their ears. 

This is not a vague philosophy or a graceful little subject 
for an essay or an idle minute. There is an art or science of 
getting people's attention and of making people look. And 
it is an intimate, personal, pressing question with every one of us 
how we can do it. Our civilization to-day in America, our 
religion, our happiness, and the very bread in our mouths, turn 
upon making certain people look. 

We cannot express ourselves. What are the words and ac- 
tions that will? 



IV 
ADVERTISING A CIVILIZ.\TION AS A RELIGION 

The spiritual secret of civilization is advertising. A civili- 
zation is a state of human society in which men make things 
happen to them that they want. 

The art of making things happen is the art of seeing and 
picking out the events one wants to happen — and then adver- 
tising and picturing them to people until they do. This seems 
to be the way that civilization in the modern sense began. 
Christ picked out a certain order and kind of events for the 
next four thousand years and picked out the men that could call 
attention to them and make them happen. 

If the most characteristic trait of Jesus of Nazareth was his 
simple and astounding faith in what could be done with atten- 
tion, his most stupendous achievement was that He really suc- 
ceeded in arresting the attention of twelve men to His own con- 
sciousness or interpretation of things — and in a certain sense to 
Himself — until He had made His own soul — what His own soul 
wanted and did not want in life, one of the great confidences, 
one of the memories and hopes of a world. He made Himself 
the prayer and the song of the nations through his power to 
attract the attention of twelve men, but He had to die to get 
these twelve men's really profound or eternal attention. 

He so far believed that the attention of these twelve men 
could be attracted and was worth attracting that he was willing 
to die to do it. He so far believed in the doctrine of attention 
and in the result that was sure to come from it that he risked 
everything that he had upon his belief that if he could get the 
attention of those twelve men, they would attract the atten- 

188 



ADVERTISING AS A RELIGION 189 

tion of all of us. He saw that his reading of the earth and the 
heavens and of the human heart should cover the earth. It was 
the most stupendous risk of a great enterprise and the most 
stupendous act of faith that has ever been, this turning by one 
man as upon a pivot thousands of years of history upon twelve 
men's attention. The whole career of Jesus was devoted to 
what looked like impossibilities of attention, to a belief in per- 
suasion, to a belief that if the attention of men could once be 
really and permanently attracted, if men could once be made 
to see, to look deeply upon what was good, no one could keep 
them from doing it. 

The most characteristic, original and compelling fact in 
our modern life, the one that we are all born to live with and 
grapple with and interpret, it has seemed to me, is Machinery. 

The other three characteristic revolutionary facts of modern 
life are the ones that come out of the Machines: jVIillionaires, 
Democracy, and Publicity. 

I have wanted to write a book in which I would try to show 
that machinery is or must be made to be a great modern religion 
and an art, that wealth (which comes out of machinery) is also 
a religion and an art, and democracy is a religion and an art, 
and now I would be glad to show that the third big modern 
child of the Machine — publicity, the art of persuading crowds, 
of fertilizing and organizing what people see, and creating the 
visions as to what they shall be and what they shall have, is 
destined to be a great art also. If we determine what shall 
possess the imaginations of the people, we steer the energies 
of the world. The art of attention, of organizing, of massing, 
of composing the picture of every man's thoughts, is the most 
colossal, the most immediate, the most determining art form of 
modern times. 

The men in this modern world who can get the attention of 
other men, especially the men who can get the attention that 
lies inside, who can put their fingers intimately upon the centre, 
upon the mainspring of the man — not merely upon his atten- 



190 WE 

tion but upon the motor nerve of his attention so that he will 
act — these men shall be the designers and the builders of the 
world. Through their power of organizing and fertilizing and 
multiplying attention they shall lift up their visions before the 
lives of men, and through the machines, and through the mil- 
lionaires, and through the crowds they shall spawn their wills 
upon the earth. 



V 

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN "AD" 

The same controlling principle will be found to apply to all 
of us — to any man who in a small way or a large way wants to 
make things happen. 

The art of making things happen seems to be first the art 
of having an idea or event- vision. 

Then it is the art of getting ourselves so that we can express 
the idea. 

Then it is the art of getting other people to express it. 

One stumbles along. Gradually one discovers certain prin- 
ciples and tries to apply them. I can only speak for myself, but 
when I began in dead earnest to try to get other people in their 
various ways to express my ideas with me, I found that the 
only way to get other people to express my ideas was to try 
to see if I could express theirs. They would not listen to mine 
until I showed that I understood theirs. And they would not 
notice that I understood theirs until they saw I had been of some 
real service to them and had really expressed them for them. As 
a matter of fact, they would not probably listen to my ideas at 
all until they found I could express their ideas for them a little 
better and more usefully than they could. 

Then I noticed that most of the men in this country are 
business men and have business methods and habits of 
thought. 

I noticed that as a class business men were not much given 
to expressing their ideas in words. 

I observed that as a result of this there had risen up rather 
suddenly a large new class of men in America, a whole great 

191 



192 ^^E 

new profession of men who were devoting their entire Uves to 
the art of expressing business men's ideas for them. 

These men were called advertising men. 

I became curious about advertising men. I began reading 
their works. 



Truth seems to prefer to come sideways, to take a peek at 
one in strange, out-of-the-way places. 

People have a theory that advertising is not to be taken very 
seriously, but if the best advertisement in Collier's Weekly for 
the year 1915 could write itself up and tell the story of its young 
life, or, rather, the innumerable little personal adventures it 
had in the minds of ninety million people, as it went out through 
the nation — if it could tell how it got a grip on the man who 
wrote and made him write it, and if it could tell how it got a 
grip on the rest of us when we read it, or why it did, or how it 
did not and why; if it could tell what it got out of our pockets 
during 1915 or what it made up our minds to allow it to take 
out in 1916 — I do not believe there would be a business man 
or a salesman in the United States who would not be deeply 
and personally interested in the story. Or any other man. 
Everything we are all doing or trying to do turns on what 
would be in the autobiography of a good advertisement if it 
could speak up. 

Everything all authors are trying to do — all poets, prophets, 
painters and singers, dreaming for the world — turns on what 
people would learn from one full, colossal autobiography of 
one national advertisement that could write itself up. 



VI 

WHAT READING ADVERTISEMENTS IS LIKE 

I did not take the advertisements in the big magazines 
seriously, all at once. I fell into the way of reading them as 
most people do, perhaps, for awhile, in a kind of half -superior 
way. It struck me as being amusing. Reading the advertising 
department of a great magazine is a little like strolling up and 
down the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago Fair. You just go 
on and on. Nobody is saying anything of course, out loud. 
Just all these firms waving their arms, flourishing a little, and 
attracting attention to their gates. 

I soon found that I was beginning to read advertisements a 
little more gravely. I cut in a little deeper with my attention — 
did not look at them quite so often just as one more idle fellow 
human being going by. I did not realize it at the time, but 
slowly I began to look up at it, at this great national broadside 
of bargains all these dear anxious people were offering me, in a 
kind of national way. Perhaps it all meant something — some- 
thing about us, and about our people, and our nation, and about 
what we really care for, and what we are really like, and what we 
might be coming to. 

I grew still more serious. I began going into the advertising 
department of a great magazine and sitting down all alone like an 
audience and watching it, profoundly and strangely absorbed — 
this vast, immeasurable pantomime of business — this silent tussle 
of the trusts to feed the people, to build their houses for them, to 
put out chairs for them to sit in, mattresses for them to sleep on, 
telling them what to read and what to play and how to work and 
how to be good and happy 

193 



194 WE 

It does not seem always like a mere pantomime to me now, but 
it did then, and at first. 

About this time I had occasion to look over a file of old news- 
papers with the general idea of seeing what people in Boston 
seventy years ago were like. I discovered that while Boston did 
her best and bravest in her editorials in that day, and in her 
literary articles, and struggled together as many interesting 
things that had happened to people as she could get, and put 
them carefully in the news columns, the news or the things 
that happened to them told what the people were like, 
only a very little, and the articles, the things that they 
thought about the news, hardly told what they were like at 
all; but there was hardly anything about them that could 
not be found out by reading the advertisements of those old 
Boston people : their motives and likes and dislikes and points 
of view, the inner history, the dramatic truth — the truth 
as they were acting it out — the naked life were all in the adver- 
tising columns. 

And I noticed, too, that when I was reading the news I skipped 
some very important things (of course news had to be impor- 
tant to get into Boston papers), and through all their learned 
ideas and their ideas about their ideas and all their Boston State 
of Mind I skipped. 

If I had been asked beforehand, I would have said that their 
advertisements would do to read probably, and would be in- 
teresting, but I would not have believed that I would find as I 
looked over paper after paper that the live, lovable, human 
better souls of those old Bostonians — their spirits, their hope and 
joy, and their religion and their art, would best be looked up by 
going vulgarly, as one might say, up and down those columns like 
streets of their buying and selling, and seeing how they spent 
their money or how somebody hoped that they would— and why 
they hoped that they would. 

But this is the way it was. And then I began reading our own 
advertisements still more seriously. The next time I took up 



WHAT READING ADVERTISEMENTS IS LIKE 195 

McClures and Everybody's, I turned (begging them a thousand 
pardons) and read their advertising pages first. 

I am more interested in the people as a whole, in the United 
States, than I am in the authors who write in McClures and 
Everybody's — most of them. Every now and then — and indeed 
more and more often — one comes on an author who will seem to 
speak up for a whole nation in a magazine and to speak to one 
in the deeper, truer, more national tone, the tone that carries 
mountains and hills with it and far smoking cities and church 
bells and the sunny little villages in the plains — I say every now 
and then this will happen ; but for the most part the authors in 
magazines — well, one does feel sure they would not pay much 
for the things they say in them the way the advertising men do. 

But of course they can be confined strictly to the body of the 
magazine, and when I turn to the advertising section — or what 
one might call, to carry out the figure, the soul of the magazine — 
I find very soon that whatever else might be said of it, I am in a 
Great Crowded Presence, and that in dead earnest, in fierce 
desire, in grim, strange, genial, happy or desperate desire, in a 
voice that gathers itself up out of a thousand, thousand hills and 
villages and smoking cities, I hear a Nation speak. 

Except when it is taken in its inferences and between the lines, 
it might not seem to some people our best tone, but at least it is 
a fine husky national voice as of some great strapping youth — 
ninety millions strong. It is not a little local falsetto voice of one 
single author before us all, piping up on his own little hill. In 
the advertising section all crowded up together, the Nation 
speaks. What we really are is there — all of us are there calling 
to one another, and the desire and the might of living, and the 
joy — the solemn and strange joy — the youth of a great people is 
there. 

To me it is as an ocean or sky, or continent of Desire, and the 
smoking factories and the vast surf of the voices of cities and the 
echoe so fall the little hills and valleys go rolling through it. 

But it does not always seem to me a voice. There are mo- 



196 WE 

ments when softly as I go, I think I see a Face — the way one sees 
one in clouds, perhaps, sometimes — a mighty amorphous bound- 
less face. But oftener it is more like a play, a vast pageant, a 
colossal, silent spectacle of Us, of our people, of our ideas, of our 
Things — the things we pour our living into, the vast landscape or 
valley of Desire in the United States. 

There is not a single number of McClures or Everybody's that 
does not seem to me like a great romance of a great people, with 
touches of tragedy and comedy in it and always that mighty 
amorphous Desire. The portrait of a great nation looks out at 
me there — full of its meanness and its greatness, its doggedness 
and splendour and hope. 

Incidentally, too, as the great billboard stretches up and one 
looks, one sees around, behind, partly hidden and holding his 
billboard up, the gigantic, living, changing figure of the Ameri- 
can Business Man — the American Busmess Man as he is, as he 
might be, as he is going to be. 

I keep on still looking at the changing, living figure. I wonder 
about him, and I wish — how I wish I could see his face ! 



VII 
CONSEQUENCES OF READING ADVERTISEMENTS 

But as time went on I began to discover that I was noticing 
advertisements not merely as a patriot or because I was in- 
terested in a nation and in the huge, informal portrait that was 
being made of it every month in McClures and Everybody's 
Magazine. I found I was seriously reading the advertising sec- 
tion of magazines as a mere author. 

The advertising men interested me as an artist. This shocked 
me a little at first and I knew in a slinking way, of course, what 
Barrett Wendell would think, but I kept on. I was drawn to 
them. I could not have told exactly why, but in distinction from 
the other people — the people who wrote in the body of the maga- 
zine, they really seemed to me to be trying to do something. And 
most of them were trying, apparently, to do something with me. 
They were apt to be the wrong things they were trying to do with 
me. I was not much interested in the things perhaps, but I was 
always being interested in the way they tried to do them. 

What did they think most people were really like? What 
were they like themselves.^ How much of it did they believe and 
how much of it did they think I would believe.'^ What would 
happen to you, I used to wonder, if you met one of them on the 
street some day, popped out one of his own advertisements at 
him — one he had written with his own hand — and asked him 
honestly, man to man, face to face, just how he felt about it — 
personally and privately — what would he say? 

I used to think of these things as I kept reading advertise- 
ments from time to time. 

x\s time went on I gradually discovered that from the point of 

197 



198 



WE 



view of a humanist or of a man who hked to sit by and watch our 
common human nature in this world, working away on itself, the 
advertising pages not only had more meat in them than the rest 
of the magazine, but they had more style. Men who were try- 
ing to make their words really do things were forced to use better 
words, apparently, or more fit for their purpose — or the words 
wouldn't do them. And even when the men who wrote the ad- 
vertising pages did not make their words do things, they tried to. 
I was drawn to them because they took words seriously. They 
seemed to have discovered what words were for. They knew 
what style was, and if they had any in them, it seemed to me, 
they were on the right road and were going to get it. 

I noticed that some of the advertisements were written by men 
who had a great deal of style — a sense of fitness of words for their 
purpose. Others had comparatively little. 

I noticed that some of the advertisements were written by 
good men. Others were written apparently by bad ones. 

I discovered that the advertisements by the good men were 
the ones that had style. They did what they were meant to do. 
They made me believe them. 

I discovered that the advertisements by the bad men did not 
have style. They could not make their words do with me what 
they tried to do with me. They did not make me believe them. 

I then discovered that advertising was a great profession, be- 
cause great success or permanent efficiency in it depended and 
was bound to depend upon the greatest gift in human nature — 
the gift of being transparent — of just being good inside, of being 
radiantly and contagiously good. 

A man has to have such a genius for being sincere that even on 
paper one can hear his voice. One sees him when he is not there. 
One hears him when he is still. . . . 

Another reason I have found myself often liking the ad- 
authors better than I do the average run of regular-line authors 
that all our advertising magazines have to have of course is that 
the ad-authors seem to me to be more independent. They are not 



READING ADVERTISEMENTS 199 

merely trying to be polite to me and to everybody, slaving away 
all the while the way the regular authors do to make me and 
everybody like them and bow low to them. They are more 
serious, and they make me feel they are really trying to do some- 
thing serious with me. However they may go fooling in that 
innocent-looking way about my pocketbook, I know that there 
is something they really care to make happen and that they pro- 
pose to make this something happen to me. 

Now as a matter of fact nobody ever pays very much attention 
to me or to what I have happen to me in the regular respectable 
high-collared columns of a magazine. Here is a man with some 
news to me about myself. Even if a man's interest in news for 
me whittles down into telling me some news he thinks I ought to 
know about how to spend my money, he is really giving me some- 
thing that is certainly news about him and that may be news 
about me. I feel him grappling with me, with my real life — 
with what I will do, and with what I won't. 

And I like it. Having a man say what I won't do interests 
me, even though of course as one does mostly, I merely talk back 
and say for myself and pass on. I like to see an author show some 
imagination about me, about himself, about what he thinks or 
assumes this world is that lies all about us or that is supposed to 
be yawning between us. 

I like to watch him working his way over to me across it. And 
when for an hour or so I have been reading the regular authors, 
the ones in the parlour of the magazine, it warms the cockles of 
my heart to move over to the back pages and see all those ad-men 
crowding up the way they do in their section, column after column 
as fellow human beings. I always like to step outdoors into this 
ad-section of a magazine. I like the folks one meets there. I 
like to see them line right up man-fashion to my life and delibera- 
ately before my eyes, and with my full knowledge staring them 
full in the face, try to make a dent in my income, make a broad 
honest actual whack on my life. One of the best places to 
whack on a man's life is on his pocketbook. He notices more. 



200 WE 

There is a kind of moral vigour, a shrewd straightforward- 
ness, a keenness about hfe and about things that human beings 
do, or can be got to do, that goes with being an advertising man 
of the real sort. 

Of course I can only speak for myself. I do not know that 
I can quite define what it is about our regular American authors 
but there is a something about being a regular author to-day 
that is the matter. They are not serious with the reader and 
they are not serious with the editor. I do not really know what 
it is they are doing. I go up and down in the columns and 
watch them of course, more or less the way everybody does — 
our American authors — but what is it, what is it that anybody 
can say, they are really doing? For the most part the authors 
in magazines to-day — well, sometimes it seems as if they were 
just being authors! 

It is something the same feeling one comes to have about 
ministers some days — that they are just being ministers. 

I may be wrong in my reading of American human nature, 
but my main experience is that the way to get acquainted with 
an American man, to taste his quality, to like him, dislike him, 
commune with him, is to do something with him, or let him try 
to do something with me. If one is selecting the best thing to 
do, to call a man out in America, as things are now, the best 
way to get intimate with a man is to Avatch him trying to see 
how he can make you spend your money. 

This is why I dote on advertisements. They are all or nearly . 
all little autobiographies of American men — telling their religion, 
their education, their grasp on life and on their own brains and 
on their own pocketbooks and on mine — everything that is 
really characteristic and from down in the deeps of a true Amer- 
ican comes up when he is using words to express action or is 
using action to express words. The less he says about his soul 
as a soul, a pure mere soul, the better. It is the very soul of 
him that he won't. It is the soul of him that he cannot. 

And this is why— as bad as advertisements often are— after 



READING ADVERTISEMENTS 201 

I have been all chilled through in a magazine by the regular 
authors, I slip into the advertising section, elbow my mind's 
way through, jostle along, know and mingle with people, and 
feel that I am at last in a fine, real world with a lot of fine, husky 
sinners, of real fellow human beings about me, who are being 
themselves. 

Another thing I like about the writers in the ad-section is 
that when they have things to say to me they pay me for it. 
And of course while I can only speak for one I record the con- 
viction that if most of the authors in our magazines had to 
pay to say the things to us that they are saying, they would not 
say most of them. 

It is what a man will put up on what he says that gives it 
its value and its carrying power. 



VIII 
MORE CONSEQUENCES 

It was about this time, when I had reached this state of 
mind about advertising, that I made one more struggle to be 
hterary and started my Uttle magazine. It happened one day 
that an advertisement of a toothbrush which had been offered 
and which was well enough in its way did not quite fall in, as 
it seemed to me, with the more or less free and unconvention- 
ally literary spirit in which the magazine was published, and it 
occurred to me it would do no harm perhaps — for the purpose 
of the First Appearance of a Toothbrush in my magazine — to 
retouch the advertisement a little. When I called up the peo- 
ple who had sent it in and told them I would like to rewrite a 

sentence or so in it, I heard the factory (in the voice of ) 

saying cheerfully, "Why not rewrite it all.f^ Why not write an 
ad yourself.^" 

This was the turning-point of my life, that voice over the 
telephone saying, "Why not write an ad yourself.?" 

I tried at first pasting on, as it were, a little sentence. Of 
course it looked stuck on and was queer. I then tried to tone 
the queer place down a little by putting more with it. Then, of 
course, as I might have known — I rewrote it all — or rather wrote 
another one. 

It is very comical — almost pathetic to me now as I look back 
over fifteen years — to remember how superior I felt toward 
that toothbrush when I tried to express it that first morning. 
If I had not half promised over the telephone to do it, I would 
have stopped. I might never have risen above what seems to 
me now the low literary level where I was that day, to the higher, 

202 



MORE CONSEQUENCES 203 

more desperate level where daily I am living now, where ex- 
pressing myself, expressing the way I really feel about any- 
thing — if I yet may be permitted before I die — seems to me a 
great and almost impossible feat. A toothbrush, of course, if I 
really had any feelings about it, would do as well to practise 
on as the next thing, and it might do less harm than my feelings 
about feminism or the fourth chapter of John would. 

Slowly I began to see the light. 

If what people wanted from me was my reminiscences, moods, 
and impressions, my hopes and fears on fountain pens — if they 
really had more use for the time being for my ideals for fountain 
pens than my ideals for a nation, I must not be any more un- 
willing than I could help. I tried to remind myself sternly of 
all my fine theories about art and real life. I had always said 
that the thing that was next to me was none too good for me 
until I had done it too well. All I had to do was to be true to 
my ideals about anything from a fountain pen to a victrola and I 
could not go far wrong. 

I who love crowds and railway stations and streets, I who 
love machines, I who have loved and pitied, even hoped for 
millionaires, shall I quail before a fountain pen which really 
works and does not black my fingers? My ire against myself 
rose slowly. Should I who had taken for the name of my little 
magazine, my own little mountain out in my own front yard 
because I wanted everybody to love it, should I let my knees 
go out from under me before a fountain pen, before the pen in 
my own hand, should I be ashamed to write about it or feel 
superior to it — I, a lover of poetry in prose, of streets with the 
sky over them, of common folks, of the forks and spoons and 
of the chairs they sat in, of their very andirons, their radiators, 
and their bedsteads — should I retreat now in this eleventh 
hour and be afraid of my own toothbrush? With the voice at the 
telephone still ringing in my ears, I wrote several advertise- 
ments and went on from one advertisement to another in a 
homely way for other people's mouths — I even broke out into 



204 WE 

poetry on a toothbrush (a small boy's one) and I soon became 
ready to declare as I do now, solemnly and without fear before 
the world, that though my ideals for a world be read in twenty 
languages in twenty nations and my name be in every mouth I 
shall be happy still and shall be proud and glad still to make a 
toothbrush as interesting to other people as a toothbrush is to 
me. 



IX 

MOUNT TOM IS CON\^RTED 

Motto: {To he Sung to the Tune of "I want to be an Angel.'') 

I want to be an Ad-man 
And with the Ad-men stand 
A Searchlight on my forehead 
And a world ivithin my hand. 

But with all my gladness and fresh desire to be of service, I 
did not find it as easy to be of some use — to a toothbrush — as 
I would have thought. 

I had to be honest with a toothbrush. I had to struggle 
to realize w^hat it was. (People may laugh if they like.) I had 
to go through spiritual fires to express a toothbrush as well as 
I could. 

A man never realizes anything until he tries either in action 
or in words to express it to himself. If he can express it to 
others, he realizes it still more. 

I had been writing and was writing every day about every- 
thing that interested me, trying to realize things in words and 
to make them over into a kind of word-living: the angleworm 
on the sidewalk after the rain at 206 South Street was in the 
same number of Mount Tom I was writing that week, roosters, 
too, and poor people, dogs, poppies, clouds and mountains, 
Walt Whitman — dandelions and some little whirls of dust I 
saw in the road. . . . 

On the same principle, I might be in the middle of a book 
on the poetry of the future (which I was), but I could not help 
having off moments of being interested in toothbrushes — in the 

205 



C20G WE 

humanness, the homeliness — in the spiritual experiences parents 
had in trying to get children to use them. And in the children's 
spiritual experiences, too. 

And the same was true of writing paper or hot-water bottles, 
and also, Gentle Reader, would you believe it, even of soap and 
of hooks and eyes and of the ethics, aesthetics, dynamics and 
immoralities of pianolas ! 

Trying to get a boy to use his toothbrush is a serious, amus- 
ing, and interesting subject. All one has to do is to get enough 
of the boy in. Everything is interesting when one sees it in all 
its bearings or enough of its bearings. 

I do not want to dwell on this point too long, but the 
whole point of my book turns on it, on what might seem at 
first perhaps the telling of the little story of my own mind and 
of how I was brought out from a region of literary snobbishness 
— an art preserve, from that old private, select twilight or 
moonlight of the arts into what seems to me now the plainer, 
deeper, higher, more radiant sunshine of the common day whicli 
sheds itself with the same delight on redwood trees and milk- 
weeds, which clotlies the ocean with wonder — does off dew- 
drops, pyramids and nations all at a stroke, which at the same 
time up in the wide sky holds the stars in their places and on 
the nursery walls frolics with the baby in his crib. 

Suffice it to say that advertisement writing undertaken in 
this way as a means of making practicable a good start for 
Mount Tom was too profitable to be long necessary. If I was 
to write with regard to other things as I wanted to, it soon be- 
came apparent that with regard to the advertisements (if I 
did not want to peter out into a millionaire) they would have 
to be dropped. So they were. 

The advertisements in Mount Tom as they appeared from 
issue to issue were copyrighted. They were then sold outright 
for a generous price to the manufacturers interested and used 
and printed as they liked in all magazines. 

Of course what I supposed I was working out (having the 



MOUNT TOM IS CONVERTED 207 

position of being a capitalist without having any capital) was 
a scheme for giving Mount Tom a start, but what I was really 
working out was very different. I was working out with bits 
of ink on bits of paper, blunderingly, with my eyes slowly 
prying open, a vision of civilization, a theory of literature — 
(and with a strange new gladness) one more man's life ! 

All the great principles that aj)})ly in literature and art, the 
principle of seeing the universal in the particular, the infinite in 
the little, the slow, deep, transfiguring or illuminating of the 
world which the artist lives to achieve — all these are brought 
into play in trying to express in all its relations to humanity, 
the round of human emotions, the common-looking things. 
They are very convenient. Everybody has some of them. 
And they have become common-looking things only because 
very common people, i. e., very tired, hurried people, or inspired 
people in their very tired moods, have allowed them one by one 
to slip over into that sea of meaninglessness, of sleep, of inatten- 
tion and emptiness that rolls in our ears. Every now and then 
I find myself on purpose going out about me — and looking — 
deliberately rescuing some common workaday thing. It makes 
the world all over in a minute when I have done it. I wake up 
into that old delighted awareness once more — that old literal 
face-to-faceness with things; I see this beautiful young world, 
like some mighty youth in his gray work clothes, suddenly 
stripped before me, standing there like a god in the morning. 
It makes me strangely happy. If no one ever saw a line of what 
I have felt in looking at a fountain pen or in trying to make 
people buy a fountain pen — I would write the advertisement for 
what the advertisement did for me. If I can get my homely 
world about me suddenly touched with imagination — flooded 
with light — I do not care whether it is done by my thoughts in 
the presence of a brook, a mountain, or a typewriter, or a spool 
of thread. I do not care whether the light is turned on by a 
sunset or a button. A sunset is a button — to God, and if I am 
in my senses a button is a sunset to me. 



208 WE 

If I wanted to train a boy to be a literary artist I would have 
him write exclusively at first about little things until he saw 
the heavens and the earth and his God reflected in the little 
things — the praying and singing of his own life, until his life be- 
came filled with tiny, mighty symbols, dewdrop-universes, dande- 
lions, Pleiades up over the sleepy world, and crickets in the grass 
chanting to the sky. What makes a man a man in this world is 
the platitudes he can destroy — the miracles he has stripped off of 
the common things at his side. He can go anywhere. There is 
always that perennial fresh, innocent nakedness of simple things 
before his soul. 

And so he lives and keeps a boy and becomes a man — becomes 
a candidate for an artist or even a prophet. 

If I wanted to train a boy to be not only a literary artist but a 
prophet, to become a master, a mighty lover, a magician in the 
human heart — an artist in making things happen, I would let 
him try his hand at writing about the things that human beings 
use and want, the things that most men despise, until they be- 
come as warm and human, as big with his soul, as touched with 
affection and beauty and fear and hope as the lives of the men 
and the women who use them. 

The man who picks up a lady's handkerchief or a flower that 
she has dropped and who hides it or carries it around with him 
for days as a presence, as a smile, as a voice — has in him the 
spiritual secret out of which Wordsworth wrote his Ode to Im- 
mortality, and out of which any real man does any real thing. 

The seeing a thing in an intense, vivid, poetic realness in its 
full associations, its deepest human associations, and possibili- 
ties as it really is, is what Wordsworth wrote his poetry out of. 
Shakespeare in writing Hamlet's soliloquy with the skull and 
John Powers in writing his advertisement of the Macbeth lamp 
chimney both played with the same divine, terrible, beautiful 
fire of human association, of electric human realization, the fire 
that burns through what they are writing about, their purpose 
in writing it. 



MOUNT TOM IS CONVERTED 209 

I am not sure, too, but that it is more difficult to attain the 
necessary purity of being, the moral transparency and artistic 
honesty to express a lamp chimney so that anyone will want to 
buy one to see if it is as represented, than it is to express death so 
that anybody would want to die to see if it is as quaint and 
curious and amusing as represented by Shakespeare in Ham- 
let's soliloquy^ 

The principle of spiritual and physical preparation and train- 
ing necessary for both of these acts of expression is the same, and 
I doubt if there is a man who could successfully contradict the 
fact that this is the law of artistic expression except some man 
who cannot express himself and who will not really be right, of 
course, until he can. 

This is what I mean by the first paragraph of this chapter: "I 
had to be honest with a toothbrush. I had to struggle to realize 
what it was. (People may laugh if they like.) I had to go 
through spiritual fires to express a toothbrush as well as I could." 



MOUNT TOM JUNCTION BRACES UP 

The advertisements in these early numbers of Mount Tom 
were fenced off sternly, and all refined persons were warned with 
a fine literary flourish what they were coming to. There was a 
full-page picture of a road leading downhill and a big guide 
board with a hand on it pointing down the hill "To Mount Tom 
Junction." Everybody knew the minute they turned that way 
that they were to be in a world with railway trains, smoke, noise, 
business, and profits and loss, but all the while the man who was 
personally conducting both ends of the magazine was feeling in 
spite of himself like precisely the same person — word for word, 
motive for motive, whether up on top of the mountain or down 
at the Junction. 



Then things began to happen. 

The New York Sun, which had never used or quoted as yet a 
single idea from the literary preserve on the top of Mount Tom, 
copied in full on its editorial page one day a modest account of 
the spiritual experiences of a boy whose mother made him use his 
toothbrush (omitting, of course, with due refinement, the name 
of the toothbrush). 

Other papers did things of the same kind from time to time, 
and people over and over again when they were renewing their 
subscriptions would add a P. S. and would admit cheerfully to the 
somewhat dazed editor that the first thing they did when their 
Mount Tom came was to open it up at the advertising end, read 
the advertising section from start to finish straight through first. 

210 



MOUNT TOM JUNCTION BRACES UP 211 

In other words, after they had read one after the other about 
each of the things I had been paid to interest them in, they 
turned as a last resort to those fine costly ideas I had prepared 
for them — the ideas that I was paying my own good money, 
line by line, page by page, to have them read. They just read 
those when they got ready and made out as well as they could. 
While people would say pleasant things about the restful and 
spiritual quality of Mount Tom, and about liking to have a 
magazine with a soul in it, I faced the truth at last. The natural 
approach to a soul like mine apparently was hind end on. 

I soon came to the conclusion after being duly troubled about 
this that if any approach could be provided at all to my soul, I 
would be a lucky man, and one approach was as good as another. 

I then began quite unconsciously, and as a matter of daily 
habit, to make the most of it. I soon got so that I could use my 
soul either way, interchangeably. 

I did not have any particular philosophy about it at the 
moment, but after a time, of course, having tried both literature 
and advertising in the same breath, day after day, and having 
been unable for a year or so to make any difference between the.ii 
— it was not unnatural if in my study of them both, turning as I 
did one minute to ideas I wanted people to have, and another 
minute to things I wanted them to have, I came to have more or 
less definite philosophy as to what advertising men could do for 
literature as an art in America, and what literature could do for 
advertising as a profession. 

I wrote out a list of principles one day, and it was put up in 
the next issue on the bulletin board down at the Junction-end of 
"Mount Tom." 

If I was going to be driven into being an advertising man, I 
would put up something which would stand as my ideal of my 
profession, of what I proposed to work for and look forward to, 
my Creed of Possibilities. 

I found that people about me at that time largely seemed to 
think that writing advertisements was a kind of trick. Most 



212 WE 

people think so even now. They think that writing an advertise- 
ment is an ingenuity, a sordid juggling with attention, and that 
it is not and could not hope to be a great profession like the law, 
or medicine, or like the priesthood. There seems to be a formula 
—a glib little formula for it— which many people would make 
something like this. If you want to write an advertisement, you 
put in your touch of psychology first, then your little flourish or 
graceful sweep or pass over the reader's mind of sweetness and 
light and good-will; then your large cold chunk (embedded in 
solid impregnable innocence) of worldly wisdom. Then you 
clap your hand on his pocketbook. This is an "ad," people 
think. But this has gone by. It does not work. 

It is worthy of all the superior feehngs people have toward it, 
both in writing it and reading it. 

But here is the Advertising Man's Creed I spoke of: 

1. The Advertisements in the Century must be read. 

2. If the advertisements in the Century (tucked in behind the text 
so) are to be read, they must be better than the text. 

3. If they are better than the text, the manufacturers must get 
better artists than Mr. Gilder can get, or at least Mr. Gilder's best 
ones. 

4. An artist is a man who has the power of taking anything on earth 
he is interested in, stuffing it into a hundred words, and making other 
people feel about it the way he does. 

5. Men who can do this are never in the position of applicants. 

6. The man who has a great commercial idea he wants expressed, 
and who is at the top in manufacturing, can only advertise by cooper- 
ating with the man who is at the top in writing. The man who is at 
the top in writing cannot be hired. He must be interested. 

7. If one can get him interested so that he can do it in the same 
spirit and in the same inspired way that he does his other work, the 
result will be an inspired advertisement. An advertisement one is 
going to spend $100,000 on ought to be an inspired advertisement. 

8. An inspired advertisement cannot be written by a man who is 
approached by a manufacturer as his literary servant or word-valet. 
A great master spirit in commerce or a great master idea in manufac- 
turing cannot hope to be expressed by a word- valet. 

9. Perhaps the next thing that is going to happen in advertising 
is the man who is bigger than his work, the man whose mind does its 
work as if it were play. The whole art of photography has been made 



MOUNT TOM JUNCTION BRACES UP 213 

over in twenty years by the men who have played with it. Its present 
prestige is that it has been hfted out of the hired arts and the hired men 
and the drudges and allowed to become a fine art. 

10. Advertising in its present transition stage, while its leaders 
believe this, is still for the most part being carried on laboriously and 
carefully upside down. The still continued degradation of the ad- 
writer is what holds it back. 

The special service of a good ad writer is that he will not be a servant, 
and that he is engaged in taking advertising in its highest spirit and 
making it a fine art. 

11. Nothing in a man's religion, in his personal character, in his 
good taste, and his common sense and his love of human nature, is too 
good for an ad. 



XI 

THE SPIRIT OF MAKING THINGS HAPPEN 

It is particularly hard to make things happen in America 
because the typical American business man is using all the at- 
tention he has in business, and when his business is over, while 
he may graciously and good-naturedly point to it and offer us 
all that he has, there is none there. 

Attention, as I would define it, is the power of taking a thing 
one sees and deliberately turning it around and seeing it on all 
sides, in all its relations. When a man only thinks of himself 
with reference to one fact, or thinks of a fact only with refer- 
ence to himself, or with reference to the next five minutes, he 
has not really noticed it. The movement of political and in- 
dustrial events is regularly arranged and carried through from 
ten to forty years faster in England than America, because 
Englishmen have afternoon tea in the middle of business hours. 
In addition to this the average Englishman lives in the country. 
The soil keeps him slow, wise, and rich in attention, so that he 
always has a surplus power of taking things in after he has left 
the office. There may not be as many people in England who 
own motor cars as there are in America, but there are more 
people who own their own minds, who own their own attention 
and who turn their own attention on or off as they like. 

In America, a man's attention seems to be treated mostly 
as a highly specialized business tool. The moment an American 
business man leaves his business behind he leaves himself be- 
hind. He takes his personality off, locks it in his roller-top 
desk and the remains walk out of the office. He does not 
exist until he is back in the office the next morning. Any old 

214 



THE SPIRIT OF MAKING THINGS HAPPEN 215 

new queer or stray thing that wants to come along and happen 
to him in this passive vaudeville state of mind just comes along 
and happens. After business hours one cannot get his atten- 
tion because it flickers. During business hours one cannot 
get his attention because nothing can make it flicker. Anybody 
could come along, step up to the typical successful specialized 
American business man when he is preoccupied with business, 
put him soul and body on an operating table before his own 
eyes, put in a new stomach for him, saw oft' one leg and put on 
another, and he wouldn't really notice. 

This is the reason probably that America — before anyone 
else had thought of it (and with all the rest of the world despising 
it) — invented advertising. 

We had already, because we had the poorest teeth, invented 
dentists, sent them out like missionaries to all the world, and 
now because we had the least and the poorest attention we have 
invented an entirely new and special class of highly trained 
and highly paid men, to attract our attention for us. We have 
been driven by our very defects as a people to the discovery in 
a special degree of the greatest art of modern times — the art of 
making things happen. Other countries less bankrupt than 
ours in attention could worry along with amateurs, but we 
have rapidly been forced to see in America that if we propose 
to have things happen that we want and then deliberately leave 
it to amateurs in making things happen to arrange it — it will 
be things that other people want that will happen. 

The soul of advertising is the soul of America. We are not 
disposed, in a new country, to let things happen of themselves. 
Nearly all the characteristic inventions Americans have pre- 
sented to the world are inventions in keeping things from hap- 
pening of themselves. If we find we cannot get word to people 
by letter on time, we reach down some lightning from a cloud 
and send word on a wire, and present the world with the tele- 
graph. If we find we are unable to send words to Europe be- 
cause we cannot stretch poles along on top of the sea, we make 



216 WE 

the words go on the bottom and invent the Atlantic cable, 
start up an entirely new idea of convenience for a planet — begin 
fitting up all our oceans with cables. If people try to prevent 
us from going where we like on top of the sea we dive under, 
still keep on going — and present the world with the submarine. 

Our Enghsh cousins have felt all along, not without justi- 
fication, a little high-toned and superior to us about it, but 
after all the chief reliance of England in getting its recruits 
for the sudden war was American advertising for the defense of 
the king and the country. It is interesting that the other two 
inventions which have been to the people of all nations the lead- 
ing features of the war — the submarine and the aeroplane, were 
invented by the one big peaceful people the war has left out, as 
a part of that people's mood and will — its daily, grim, dogged, 
incredible will of keeping things from happening of themselves. 

The spirit that is back of all our more characteristic Ameri- 
can inventions seems to be this advertising spirit — the spirit 
of not letting things happen, of taking them in hand ourselves 
and of making them happen. 

There has been a boastful, inept, and often unlovely side to 
this national trait — especially in its first beginnings — but if 
it has blundered us along at last into the spiritual secret of 
touching the imaginations of men, of taking the aggressive, as- 
cending, masterful, and creative note toward all men's thoughts 
and visions and lives, the note of getting their attention — of 
emphasizing their souls, of controlling their bodies and their 
actions through their souls — we shall have worried our way 
through at last in our blindness and crudeness to the most 
triumphant, the most spiritual truth of modern life, the inner 
mainspring of all religion, the secret of the peace of the world. 

We have not come to this way of working out our own salva- 
tion through our faults all at once, and we have not come to 
it consciously at all as yet perhaps, but we have at least come, 
through these same failings and our desperate cures for them, 
to recognize, as no other nation has done as yet, the new truth 



THE SPIRIT OF MAKING THINGS HAPPEN 217 

that advertising (partly as it is, and partly as we are making 
it to be) is the greatest, most spiritual profession, the most 
spiritual-minded and practical profession of our time. We 
might not say that this is true in so many words, but the degree 
to which we already act as if it were true is shown by the fact 
that we have been the first of the nations to realize how great 
the art of making things happen is, by expending extraordinary 
sums upon it, by setting apart as nowhere else in the world a 
very highly trained and especially gifted body of men who 
devote their time to nothing else, who are spending and making 
incalculable sums of money every day in making things happen 
to us and in making us make them happen. At present in 
America not only our newest but our most powerful profession 
is the profession of making people look. 

We have found that the profession of making people look can 
only be practised by men of special and drilled genius, by pro- 
found students and experts in human nature, by men of high 
intellectual training who have set themselves apart as a class, 
as a great group of engineers in getting the attention of a people. 

There are certain things that all men who are interested 
in literature or in art or religion or reform could learn from 
watching the principles employed by the best experts in making 
people look. I have wanted to dwell a little on what we must 
do, some of us, if we would succeed as well as they in advertising 
our ideas, in putting our religion, our news to men about them- 
selves, on the market, but before doing so I would like to show, 
if I can, how much indebted we already are in America to this 
special class of men, and how deeply and overwhelmingly we 
already acknowledge on every hand around us the value of 
attention. 



XII 

NEWS TO PEOPLE ABOUT THEIR OWN 
POCldETBOOKS 

I have been sitting and looking at my typewriter. I have 
been dividing up the hundred dollars I paid for it into what I 
got. 

I paid out in having my own attention to it attended to — 
forty dollars to C & C's supply house for having one where I 
could run in and look, thirty dollars more for my share of the 
national bill of expense in sweeping the country and getting me 
to want to run in and look, and, say, fifteen dollars to pay for 
food and sleep so that people who made it w ould be free to give 
their attention to making it. What was left over went for the 
typewriter. 

$40 $100 

30 85 

15 

$15 worth of typewriter 



$85 worth of attention 



As I figure it, forty per cent, of what a thing costs me is spent 
in getting it placed, in putting it in a store or some place where 
I can ask for it and go to see it if I want to; thirty per cent, more 
of what it costs me is spent in making me want to go to see it; 
fifteen per cent, is spent in actual cost of making the thing itself— 
food for people while they are making it. The fifteen per cent. 
that is left over can be put down as the value of what I get — the 
part I look at, oil, feel of and play on with my fingers. 

It is my attention-bill for my typewriter I pay most willingly 
of all, on the whole. If I could pay people in general eighty- 

218 



NEWS ABOUT OUR OWN POCKETBOOKS ^19 

five dollars apiece for attracting my attention to things, for 
telling me bits of news about my own life half as important 
to me as this news about fifteen dollars' worth of typewriter 
that I am writing this book with, has been to me, I would go on 
paying people eighty-five dollars apiece for fifteen-dollar things 
all the rest of my life — or as long as the money or the people 
held out. 

And of course if the right people would step in from day 
to day and get eighty-five dollars' worth of my attention to 
news about myself at just the right time, I would soon be rich, 
as well as wise. 

The bills of most intelligent people are eighty-five per cent, 
attention-bills. 

To-day as I was going to luncheon at the club, Mr. held 

me up a minute and introduced Mr. A. He was introduced as 
being the head of the Research Department in the National 

Company. He is paid a very large sum every year by a 

multimillionaire for keeping his attention attended to, for at- 
tracting his attention and keeping his attention attracted to 
news about himself and about his own mind and especially to 
books and parts of books he wants to know — to ideas and trends 
of the time that he can anticipate, adopt, master, fight, or do 
team-work with — in a business of fifty million a year. Perhaps 
if I could pay just the right people at just the right time to 
attract my attention I would soon be in a position to afford to 
pay them a great deal more than eighty -five dollars apiece for 
news items about my own life. 

And this is what advertising is — honest, important news to 
people about their own lives. 



The value of an automobile rolling through the street is the 
number of people going by that it can get to wish they had it. 

If the same people can be got to wish they had it without 
seeing it at all and by looking at two hundred words about it 



220 WE 

standing perfectly quiet in the middle of a little piece of paper 
eight by eleven and a half inches in the back part of Life, the 
value of the automobile is very much greater. The more people 
can be got to read the little piece of paper, the more frequently 
and ceaselessly the automobile will be seen rolling down the 
street, getting more people on the sidewalks to wish more and 
more they had it. 

It is only a limited number of people that a real automobile 
can go by on a real sidewalk in a day. 

The huge and incredible crowds in this country are all paper 
crowds — the still minds of vast unseen hordes of people stretch- 
ing away, and going ceaselessly up and down, with their 
thoughts and their pocketbooks, up and down the pages of news- 
papers and magazines. 

If the spiritual basis of all property is the amount of attention 
and desire that one can get heaped up about it in this way, and if 
the really great and incalculably important spiritual corner- 
lots of attention are in the hands of two sets of men — the hands 
of the men who own prominent pieces of paper, eight by eleven 
inches, and in the hands of the men who can pick out two 
hundred words for them that will make people look at the 
pieces of paper very carefully — it not unnaturally follows that 
these two sets of men, those who have commanding tracts of 
paper and those who can pick out two hundred words in just 
the right order to make people feel commanded by them, are in 
position to create, determine and parcel out the real values of all 
property in the United States. 

This is why I have taken the position that picking out words is 
the greatest, the most still, terrific power in modern life and the 
most noble and colossal of all the professions. Daily and 
nightly, big with fate, these men who can pick out words are 
silently building before our eyes, and silently tearing down be- 
fore our eyes,the fabric of civilization, putting in the foundations 
under all our property, parcelling out the values and determining 
the powers of all our ideas. 



xm 

NEWS TO PEOPLE ABOUT THEIR OWN BUSINESS 

There are three groups of men interested in word-pickers. 
There are the owners of the tracts of paper^the magazine pro- 
prietors, there are the business men who want room in these 
tracts of paper to sell things, and there are the people who fre- 
quent tracts of paper and do their buying in them. 

The magazine proprietor wants the word-picker — the man who 
has the power of grasping words like living symbols out of the 
heart blood of people's lives, who arranges the patterns of the 
inside of people's minds — to be the best word-picker that can be 
had. He wants the advertisements for the people whose atten- 
tion he has fenced off in his magazine to be such arresting and 
holding advertisements that the advertising enclosure in his 
magazine will make all the people frequent it, that every business 
man will know that all the people frequent it and will egregiously 
long to put his head into it — even if only for a little peep — if he 
may, and will be willing to pay as much for a little advertisement 
in his magazine as he would for a big one in the others. 

The proprietor of a magazine insists with the business man, 
who wants part of the space in the public mind he has to let, on 
his employing a word-picker of a high degree of engineering 
power in getting attention. 

The business man places the same emphasis on the word- 
picker. If he is to pay five thousand dollars for a square of com- 
manding paper eight inches by ten he would rather, if he could, 
find some man who by putting words on it can get as much at- 
tention for four inches by six as someone else could for eight by 
ten. 



222 WE 

This puts the man who is a master of the technique of words, 
of making people look with ink, the man who is an engineer in 
focussing attention, who has the power of making a present to a 
piano of its own value, by picking out words that make people 
want it, in a singularly intrenched and indisputable command of 
all business men who have something to sell. 

So it is coming to pass at last that the plain sons of spiritual 
toil, artisans in imagination, word-fitters and plumbers, humble 
sons of Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, are becoming before 
our eyes the natural determiners of values, the rulers of the 
material properties of the world, because all the spiritual prop- 
erty is already theirs. The property of what is going on in 
men's minds and of what men can be made to want and of the way 
men feel about what they have, is already- theirs. So every- 
thing is. All that other property can do is to tag along behind 
their property and take the value their souls pass out to it — 
automobiles, sewing machines, glass, iron, stoves, aluminium, 
skyscrapers and soaps — all material forms of property must 
hark back for any value they may be allowed to have to the 
spiritual property — the vast territory of unreal estate that is 
now and forever the empire of unseen men with fountain-pens — 
who by tracing quiet little quirls of ink on white paper, touch 
the feelings, chain the imaginations and rule the desires of 
men. 

The twentieth century is the most spiritual century the world 
has ever dreamed of before — because before our eyes — even 
while we look, we can see on every hand the iron and brass, the 
bread and corn and stone and coal of the business world — placing 
themselves wistfully in the hands of the seers and artists, into 
the hands of the spiritual specialists, the imagination-experts, 
soul engineers, the faith-builders, the religion-makers, the 
masters of the spells that shall sway the thoughts of men, 
the choosers of the ideals that shall be the drive-wheels of the 
world. 

It is true that I do not now know any advertising men who are 



NEWS ABOUT OUR OWN BUSINESS 223 

living up to within twenty per cent, of what I am saying their pro- 
fession is, but the moment we have an advertising man suffi- 
ciently touched with the genius of literature — that is with a pure, 
high, sincere technique of touching the imaginations of men — 
everything that I claim for the advertising man will be seen 
going into his hands. 

The moment the attention-engineer or word-picker has the 
necessary technique, and really delivers to a business man the 
territory of attention he commands, really hands over the in- 
sides of the minds and cores of the wills of crowds of people, the 
situation between him and his supposed employer might be 
stated perhaps something like this : 

First. If by picking out words better than the next best man 
you can get, I can make it possible for you to spend fifty thou- 
sand a year on space instead of a hundred thousand, and if I 
thus save you fifty thousand dollars a year, I want either a large 
share of the money I save or a share in the business I create. 

Second. As an expert in touching the imagination of crowds I 
guarantee that I can sell you twice as many goods if I were to say 
these goods were sanitary as you can now sell by the things you 
are trying to say now. 

Third. But it would not be true, and if I said it, it would 
merely advertise ninety million people into an opportunity of 
finding out that what you said could not be believed, and this 
would ruin your business. It is not true because your men are 
housed in a way which makes it impossible for them to be clean 
and because their working hours keep them in a degenerate con- 
dition. I would have to make the stipulation — if you want 
your sales doubled by the way I can make people believe me, 
if you want me to write your business — that you reorganize 
your policy and your factory and make it what I must say it is. 

In this way the advertising man controls not only the attention 
of the men who read the ads but the attention of the man who 
pays for them and the attention of all the men who help him run 
his business. In other words, he controls not only publicity but 



224 WE 

manufacture of what is made and the ideas and methods and 
personaUties of the men who make it. 



The third party interested in the word-pickers is made up of 
people the words are being picked out to serve — the consumers, 
the people who follow along behind the words with their pocket- 
books. I am dealing with the point of view of these people a little 
later. It has been enough for the purpose of this chapter to call 
attention to the fact that what might be called the spiritual 
balance of power which under the organization of our modern 
life, has been supposed to be held by the magazines on the one 
side and the business interests on the other, is being daily handed 
over to the artists, to the seers and the discoverers and makers 
of furnishings for the souls of men. It is these men, the out- 
fitters of the Unseen, of the thoughts, songs, prayers and ideals 
of men, who are now to be placed in control at last of their horses 
and chariots, their houses and barns, their factories and stores, 
and their streets of buying and selling. The price of their steel 
and wood and coal and bread and butter, the profits of their mil- 
lionaires, the wages of their workmen, the time when the bell 
and whistle shall call men to their work, all the important policies 
and all details of the business world, shall be placed in the hands 
of the masters of attention, the men who conceive the ideals and 
control the spiritual energies that grip the values of the world. 

This has never quite happened before. It has only come to 
pass since the invention and general use of advertising or sales- 
manship on paper. 

A great public-service corporation trying to save millions of 
dollars by getting the good-will of the public and more millions 
of dollars by getting the good-will of its employees, is engaged in 
an exact science. It is studying every day the words and the 
actions that can do it. 

The most striking development of the last ten years in business 
is the forging to the front in one big business after the other of 



NEWS ABOUT OUR OWN BUSINESS 225 

the salesman. It is the salesman or the salesman type of man in 
one big business after the other to whom the high ojffices and the 
most powers are being implacably handed over. A salesman is a 
scientist in the exact science of getting people's attention — an 
expert in being understood. 



XIV 
NEWS TO PEOPLE ABOUT THEMSELVES 

As I look back now upon this period I do not think I really 
knew exactly what it was that was happening to me, or to my 
world within me. Anyone could see now that it was what would 
be called my own clumsy private personal experience with at- 
tention-engineering, with literature as the art of making things 
happen, and with beginning literature by making very simple 
things happen first. 

Then came the next stage. It came rather suddenly and from 
around the corner — at least it seemed so to me. 

Any other person — any kindly, half-amused and half -praying 
person like William James for instance, looking on and watching 
me flounder away at life and literature about this time, during 
my spiritual ordeal with toothbrushes — what some would call 
perhaps my spiritual teething period — would have known all 
the while what was going to happen to me next. I need not go 
into details. But here at least is the philosophy or conviction 
back of what happened next. 

Any country that pays two or three times as much more for 
advertising its food as it does for advertising its brains or its 
happiness or states of mind or its religion is bound to be second- 
rate in material and spiritual things both. This puts in one 
sentence the conviction that I found myself fronted up with and 
that I had to begin to make things happen out of. 

I began by trying to think what would happen or could be 
made to happen if as much money and brains could be spent 
in a year in getting people to know as much about coopera- 
tion between capital and labour as they know now about soap. 

226 



NEWS TO PEOPLE ABOUT THEMSELVES 227 

When one once begins thinking of a thing Hke this the thought 
is very apt to come back in one form or another nearly every day. 
At least it did to me. 

While Mr. Rockefeller is spending a million dollars on adver- 
tising through the South how not to have a hookworm, one falls 
to calculating what it would mean if during the next year some 
other millionaire would spend a million dollars on the present 
hookworm of the millionaire class and of the labouring class — the 
sick, slovenly poor-white idea, the hookworm that capital 
should pay as little as it dares to its workmen and the hookworm 
that workmen should work as little as they dare for their money. 

If I could have the money spent every year in getting me to use 
one kind of soap instead of another, both of them fairly good, or 
one breakfast-food rather than another when I really would not 
turn over my hand for the difference, and if I could go through 
the country and collect all the fortunes that are being spent in 
snatching me away from one chewing-gum to another, or from 
one cigar or bathtub to another, if I could collect all the money 
and use it to keep before the attention of the country one single 
successfully governed city, one city that is keeping house with 
self-respect and decency until every city would know how it did 
it, or if I could spend the money lavished in getting me over from 
one chewing-gum to another on some really great genius of a 
teacher, or in having everybody know about him, or some great 
industry in which the Golden Rule works, I would soon be doing 
more good than all the colleges and all the churches combined. 
It is true that colleges do spend endowments in advertising 
ideas, ideas that have been advertised for four thousand years. 
But the colleges are at a great disadvantage in advertising new 
ideas because they have to stop to begin with raising up profes- 
sors at least twenty-five years old to teach the new ideas, and by 
that time the ideas are old. And the kind of advertising that 
most presses to be done, and that it most richly pays society to 
have done, is the advertising of the ideas that are new, the latest 
experiments in human nature, the great newspaper, the great 



228 ^^E 

publisher, and how he manages to be one, the one great man in 
each industry nobody would have believed in five years ago— I 
would spend millions of dollars every year in organizing the at- 
tention of the nation until men should be as well informed about 
what they are and about what they want to be as they are now 
about what they want to buy. 

What is there a man could not come to in America if he could 
have his heart as well informed as his purse? 

Everything is being advertised to-day except the things we 
want to know about ourselves. 

We have but to take a look — any man of us — and here we all 
are running around, nine men out of ten of us, almost, not 
knowing what we are for or what we want to live for. We want 
chairs, beds, parlours, food and clothes for our souls and furni- 
ture for our minds. 

We do not know how to work. Work is civil war. We do 
not know how to play, how to fall in love, or how to be happy, 
how to get on with husbands and wives. We do not know how 
to get on with ourselves. 

It is wonderful to think what the world would soon be like 
if the news about one's soul were suddenly to be as expensively 
and as eloquently placed before one as the news about one's 
purse. Why does not someone hire the back page of the Satur- 
day Evening Post for five thousand dollars a week and tell me 
five thousand dollars' worth in that glorified bit of publicity, 
that sixteen inches by ten of fierce light, of news as to how to 
spend my life instead of merely news about how to spend my 
money? New kinds and new sizes of men instead of new sizes 
of toothbrushes and safety pins? 

Instead of endowing merely hospitals, colleges, and libraries, 
which almost anybody nowadays would know enough to do, 
millionaires are going to spend fortunes in advertising new 
kinds and new sizes of motives in business which work, and in 
advertising how they work. 

Some millionaire will take up any one of these four illusions 



NEWS TO PEOPLE ABOUT THEMSELVES 229 

that people have to-day and see what he can do to destroy 
them. 

Illusion I: All that business is for is to make money. 

Illusion II: Workmen will always fight their employers. 

Illusion III : A private corporation will give as little service 
to a city as it dares. I would spend a fortune in having every 
city know all there is to know about an electric light company 
I know. 

Illusion IV : To get what you want in business look out for 
yourself. Let the man you deal with look out for himself. 

Every one of these illusions would be removed by some man 
of genius or attention-engineer, by some expert in touching the 
imagination of crowds. He would take up these illusions one 
by one and go at them the way men go at Quaker Oats. 

The reason for this course of procedure as a constructive 
policy for all live men in a nation to act on, lies in the nature of 
news. 

All news that is of the greatest originality and the greatest 
power over the lives and destinies of others is of the nature of 
an invention. It is seen first by individual persons. 

The three thousand editors of America cannot be expected 
to be in the habit of seeing en masse the most important things 
about this country and about what has got to happen in it or 
what needs to be invented to happen in it first. Nor are they, 
the three thousand editors of America, struggling under their vast 
routine, pinned under their printing presses and corporations, 
tangled up and held down in the common observations and com- 
mon interpretations of their more or less chronically amateur 
news-collectors, off-hand reporters and boys out of college, to 
be expected to make known of themselves en masse the most 
important inventions in nation-building for this nation. 

Individual men will have to think of things first. 

And individual men will have to pay to have everybody know 
about them first. 

There is no reason why in a mighty and resourceful nation 



230 WE 

like ours we should wait for three thousand editors to see things 
before the more important, the more amazing and revolution- 
arily hopeful news about this country and about human nature 
in it, is put before the people, and acted on by the people. 

One miUionaire and one inventor between them could make a 
short cut between events for this people like the Culebra Cut, 
like the Panama Canal, which would make everybody know in 
a year what would get around to them through three thousand 
editors en masse, in a century. 

It is not that the editors in America are not doing as well as 
any other body of men to perform their function, under existing 
conditions. 

It is merely that Wilbur Wrights and Marconis in discovering 
news, Luther Burbanks in events, Luther Burbanks in think- 
ing of things to happen to a nation, and Edisons in getting 
people to know^ about them until they do, do not come in large 
lots of three thousand. 

The big nation-building inventions are thought of by in- 
dividuals first, and in a democratic country like ours where we 
believe in individuals and where we expect great things of 
individuals, where we make individuals great by giving them 
sublime opportunities to do great things, the big ideas or news 
about people which is thought of by individuals first must be 
advertised by individuals first. 

There is no reason why the country should be obliged to wait 
for three thousand editors to see them en masse. Brand-new 
news is for all kinds of people. A whole countryful of free men 
which is depending upon the kind of news that one kind of men 
pick out for it — that one kind of men try to express for it, wastes 
nine tenths of its resources in discovering, telling and inter- 
preting news. We must have a way to do something that will 
make news in this country cut across to everybody , 

The recognition and interpretation of real news — i. e., of 
new news — is a common right and common service of us all 
and of all the people. The natural convenient short-cut to the 



NEWS TO PEOPLE ABOTJT THEMSELVES 231 

people and to getting news quickly before the people where the 
most men and kinds of men can get to work on it is to have two 
men act promptly in the advertising columns of the press — one 
man inventing, discovering and selecting an idea for a nation 
to be great with, for a nation to make happen, and the other 
paying the necessary expenses for their knowing it and for their 
being followed up and pursued by it in the reading world as 
quickly, as vigorously and aggressively as they would be by any 
of the greater more prominent bathtubs, silk stockings or union 
suits. 

Perhaps I need not say by way of w^arning in opening up a free 
field like this that it would be a great mistake for an angel or 
any other egregiously proper, prematurely noble person to think 
that this idea of mine is a little opening for him. Any man who 
would do a thing like this with a sense of virtue or as a noble 
character, instead of because he doted on it, would not know how 
to do it and would probably pick out the wrong idea. No man 
who would look noble or feel noble or allow anyone to call him 
noble while he was carrying out an idea like this, could help 
making a mess of it. Noble-looking characters or mere phi- 
lanthropists have spoiled so many good ideas that it would make 
me very unhappy to think of them as taking up this one. I 
think a good deal of it and I want it saved for people who love 
ideas and to whom advertising an idea is a simple, ordinary, 
matter-of-fact, sensible, happy human self-expression. My ob- 
servation is that real public service is like eating. It is either a 
self-indulgence or it is nothing. And it seems to me this is the 
only practical way to introduce my idea to people. If I were 
a millionaire and if I wanted to get if possible one final little 
touch of fun into my life before I died, if I wanted a real man's 
adventure with a nation or with a world, I would do something 
in the way of advertising — but I will not dwell on it. My own 
personal choice would be probably to try to advertise the idea of 
cooperation between labour and capital until it at least catches 
up to the Murad Cigarette in its prominence before the eyes of 



232 WE 

the people. The idea of cooperation— the idea of the way 
cooperation works and of how it gets things in this sordid 
^orld— is one of the daily pleasures of my life. I can imagine 
no greater daily luxury than making people believe it. On the 
whole, in my life so far, the pleasures of behef have been the 
main pleasures I have had. And the first million dollars I get 
I am going to spend on them. Thousands of other people 
must feel about their beliefs as I do about mine. There are 
thousands of us reading daily the side-columns in our news- 
papers — who are already covetous of them for the news which 
means most to us — news which if in these days we cannot die 
for, we can at least pay for. Even already before anybody has 
particularly thought of it as a deliberate policy, it is being quite 
generally recognized that the quickest way to get news that is 
important to other people or to the public to-day — public- 
spirited news — into a typical newspaper is to hire space next 
to the editorial column and tell people at a dollar a line the 
things the editors that same day in the next column ought to 
be telling them for nothing. 

Any man to-day filled with a sense of news which he would 
like to get people to want, news which will get people to want 
brand-new improved lives, news that will get them to want 
to earn money to pay for new and improved souls, for comfort- 
able thoughts, for good solid happy motives, instead of paying 
big prices to get them to want new and improved mattresses, 
gravestones, gowns and cigarettes, and little new wrinkles in 
breakfast foods — any man who would go ahead and do this in 
partnership with some hitherto uninspired millionaire, buy space 
in all magazines and papers throughout the world, would be 
felt around the world in a week. 

A millionaire who would engage the right author and who 
would proceed to buy space in all magazines and papers through- 
out the world, advertise new happy insides for people and who 
could supply them or who could show them how they could get 
them supplied, would be so swamped with business in a little 



NEWS TO PEOPLE ABOUT THEMSELVES 233 

while, that he would have half of the rest of the world as his 
employees — all busy making and arranging and fitting in for 
people new happy insides. 

In twenty years we are going to have thousands of authors, 
men who will make themselves trained experts, who will have 
trained themselves in advertising new kinds and new sizes of men 
that men can be, so that men will want to be them almost if not 
quite as much as new sizes and kinds of safety pins, automobiles 
and pianolas. 

I want to prophesy that in twenty years we are going to see 
scores of men spending fortunes in advertising the new kinds 
and new sizes of men, to the sizes of men we now have. 

There is not a man of us who in his own individual business 
would not like to see the success and practicability of new sizes 
and new^ kinds of employers or of employees. It is a personal, 
practical, daily business need as well as a national one. And we 
are all going to help as we can on it. 



But while I am expressing or trying to express my philosophy 
about advertising ideas and how I came to have it, I cannot 
quite turn my face away and go on to advertising a nation 
without once more paying tribute to that voice over the wire 
(now still forever) that asked me out of the darkness — out of the 
obscure, out of the Unknown — to write an advertisement for 
his toothbrush; nor will I be seen taking back or turning under 
a word, or be caught feeling superior one minute to one motive 
that in those early days, with a labour no one would believe, I 
put into making those advertisements serve their purpose as 
faithfully in their way as any line in this book. I number my- 
self with the advertising men. I will not admit a shading of dif- 
ference either in spirit or technique between the best page in 
this book and the best advertisement years ago of a toothbrush 
or a fountain-pen in Mount Tom. If anything, it was a great 
deal harder to write advertisements about toothbrushes in the 



234 ^^E 

same spirit and point of view and faithfulness of technique with 
which I have written on a perfectly plain, easily disinterested, 
lazily high-minded theme like the peace of the world— in this 
book. 

But as I have said before, I did not know what was happen- 
ing to me. I could not understand why people read the ad- 
vertisements in Mount Tom before they read the text, and I was 
a little grieved. 

I think I do understand now. 

I see or think I see now that people read the advertisements 
more than the text of Mount Tom those early days because there 
was more pride, courage, fresh enthusiasm, and sense of dis- 
covery in them for me while I was writing them. Also they 
were more incorruptible. It would have been so dangerous 
for me both as an artist and as a man not to believe every word 
or to be lured a sixteenth of an inch out of my way. I was on 
the edge of a precipice of self-interest along every adjective 
and noun and verb I wrote. It touches a man's imagination 
desperately to be exposed like this. 

The next thing that happened, of course, was that I made up 
my mind that I would write the other pages of my magazine 
so that people would read them as they did advertisements. 

I would see if I could not get people to spend money on 
my ideas. 

I would see if I could not get them to spend money on my 
ideas about God and Nature, and about People, and spend for- 
tunes (as I would myself, if I had them) on my ideas about 
business men and the material value of spiritual powers and of 
imagination in every-day American life. 



I have tried to state the principle I have believed in by tell- 
ing the story of how I came to believe it. It seems to sum itself 
up something like this : 

First. I tried to express myself in literature. 



NEWS TO PEOPLE ABOUT THEMSELVES 235 

Second. I discovered ad-writing as the real literature of our 
people. 

Third. I rediscovered literature — in the real life of my peo- 
ple, and have tried to deal with literature as the art of making 
things happen. 

Fourth. My main ambition as an author since then has been 
to write plays or business outlines or plots for busii;iess men to 
act. 

Business men would have to be expressed in this country be- 
fore anybody else could. We would express the next things, the 
honest, plain, fundamental things about us with nobility, power, 
and conclusiveness in America before we would have a right to 
try to express the others. 

As long as our fine arts in America try to evade or slur over our 
mechanical arts, we shall be a superficial people and our litera- 
ture will continue to be as uninteresting to other nations — al- 
most — as it is to us. Literature that does not face and express 
real men as they are, that does not make the real men arresting, 
cannot hope to accumulate the power, the concreteness, gritti- 
ness, to express ideal ones. 

True honest American literature must go back to what it calls 
the bottom, stop calling it the bottom, and then work up. 



XV 

WHY AN. ADVERTISING MAN (WHEN NO ONE IS 

LOOKING) PRAYS 

About this time when I was having a rather long blue-and-blaek 
period in which the things I have been saying had been (as often 
in my hfe) overawed once more, whelmed under by the apparent 
meaningless blank look of the material success I saw about me, I 
came in from the meadow one morning as usual and sat myself 
grimly down at my desk to write about how spiritual material 
things were. ... I was making myself sit still a few min- 
utes before beginning and was facing the world I was writing 
about. I was feeling once more — almost as never before — that 
old, hard, impervious stare of Things in it, of Things everywhere, 
lording it over me and the men about me, looking me out of 
countenance, when there came a knock on my door, and my mail 
was handed me, and in the letter I opened on top postmarked 
Philadelphia, I received an intimation that "Inspired Million- 
aires" (rejected by seventeen publishers, printed merely by the 
author, and skied by artists, critics, and litterateurs as visionary) 
was being read by the Pennsylvania Railroad. 

"If you were the manager of the Pennsylvania Railroad," the 
letter from the executive offices of the Pennsylvania said, "and 
had to write a letter of New Year's greeting from the offices of the 
Pennsylvania System to the two hundred and fifty thousand 
trainmen and workmen on all the lines, what would you say?" 

When a man off on a mountain two hundred miles away 
(really a mere disguised poet addicted to plain working-clothes 
words) receives from a great railroad a call for help in expressing 
itself to its own employees— two hundred and fifty thousand 

236 



WHY AN ADVERTISING MAN PRAYS 237 

trackmen, engineers, trainmen, along its seven thousand miles of 
road — the man off on the mountain thinks. 

If a voice on a wire about a toothbrush had changed the course 
of the man's life and his whole view of a world and made him 
think, certainly the voice of the Pennsylvania Lines — seven 
thousand miles of gleaming track, two hundred and fifty thou- 
sand men — might naturally be expected to jostle the same man 
settling down on the same mountain, into seeing things, into 
thinking of doing things he had but dreamed before. 

What I saw first and thought of first was fifty years — the next 
fifty years. 

I would like to say in this chapter what it made me think. 
What it made me do — partly remains to be seen in the fifty years, 
at least in its outlook and beginnings, and partly remains to be 
dealt with in a later chapter. 

It is hardly necessary for me to confide to the reader that I 
could not write for a great railroad like the Pennsylvania Rail- 
road a letter expressing its soul for seven thousand miles to its 
men — that I could not express from its Broad Street office the 
motives and feelings and objects and promises and hopes and 
fears, the feelings and ideas it would express to its men and that 
it would like to get its men to share with it if it could. . . 

It was because I could not do it that I was compelled to think. 
I tried to make myself answer four questions : 

"Why can I not do it.^" "Could some other man do it.^" 
"Could he do it now.^" "What will the Pennsylv^^nia Rail- 
road have to do or will the man who expresses it have to do, be- 
fore a great railroad can be expressed.'^" 

These questions brought me sharply up against a situation 
which is, and is becoming more and more to-day, a personal 
daily problem that every man in business has to meet. 

It is to this situation and to the next fifty years in which we are 
to meet it, I wish to devote this cl\apter. 

As I have already tried to state the main aspects of the situa- 
tion with which our railroads and our factories are now brought 



238 WE 

front to front, in a previous book,* I will merely state here the 
principle that seems to me meets the problem — in a sentence — 
without repeating or enlarging upon it. 

The bigger a machine is, the more genius for being human it 
takes at the top to run it. 

And it not only takes a genius at being human to run it, but an 
artist to stand by him and to express him and to express his 
being human and to make him look human. 

In one way or another all efficiency in a machine-civilization 
is bound up in making machinery look human. The modern 
business manager has a problem in the art of expression — of 
sheer expression to thousands of men — that would have made 
Shakespeare himself knock his knees together. 

If the president of the Pennsylvania Railway were to ask Kip- 
ling to share his office with him and if it was agreed that the 
president would do all the hard work of telling each man on the 
line from Chicago to New York just what to do, and that Kipling 
would attend to the job of making him want to do it — the job of 
expressing the president's conscience, his will, his humanity, his 
sense of oneness with his men — so that the men would do these 
things he told them to, the amount of money Kipling would 
save for the stockholders a year would make paying him a salary 
for it seem frivolous. And what is more, Kipling in expressing 
a great railroad — a huge, typical, modern property — would have 
done a bigger thing than any story he has done as yet and a more 
important artistic feat and human miracle than Shakespeare 
ever dreamed of. 

Civilization hangs to-day like a thread on the world's pro- 
ducing a man within the next fifty years who can express the 
genius of a great railroad. If a railroad in the twentieth century 
cannot express itself to its own men and to the public, it is not 
going to make any difference whether the passion of love is ex- 
pressed or the passion of religion. There will not be any love or 
religion— not until a great railroad can be eloquent. Until a 

*"Crowds," page 253 and chapter following. 



WHY AN ADVERTISING ]VL\N PRAYS 239 

great railroad, a typical modern property, the thing that wears 
down and grinds up all men who use it and run it into being like 
it, can be eloquent, why, in a world like this, should any man tell 
a woman he loves her or be glib and happy in expressing himself 
to his God? 

The woman will soon despise him and despise his world, and 
their children will hate to be borne in it. 

And God will not care or not seem to care. He has heard 
these things before and heard them in worlds where there was 
some reason for them over and over again. It is as if to-day and 
for the next fifty years God said — were daily saying — to the men 
of America: "These grim speechless railroads are ydu I You are 
expressing yourselves and what you really are and what you say 
you really want to be, in these. If you really wanted to be all 
these beautiful and noble things you say you do, your railroads 
— ^your most powerful expression as yet — would express them. I 
will listen to no less words from you in America than your rail- 
roads and your factories next!" 

Everything in civilization that we hold sacred rises or falls 
with this — with the power of man to express himself through his 
machines, make his machines say across his continent what he is 
like, and be human as he is human. He is responsible for his 
machines, and if his machines are not being human he is not 
being human. 

In the last analysis the art of expressing a man to two hundred 
thousand employees so that he is just as human and near as if he 
were always around with them on the spot, is best and most 
cheaply done with printed words. Actions express, too, of course, 
but words make people believe the actions mean what they seem 
to mean, and in the long run a picture or a tone of voice will do 
more in smaller compass than any other way of reaching men. 
Conveying a tone in printed words is a great art. 

Men's souls are reached through their eyes and ears. Official 
language in America, if it is to be practical and do what it tries to 
do with the men to whom it is addressed, will always have to 



240 WE 

depend not on the propriety in it but on the poetry in it, its Hve- 
hness and humanness, and its power of conveying personaUty. 

So here it has come to pass — or I see it coming in the next 
fifty years. I behold the property interests and the industrial 
interests of a world turning to painters, to artists, and to poets at 
last; and in the teeth of the greatest cataclysm that history has 
ever known, asking poets to protect their property, poets to oil 
their business, poets to make their way with the people and help 
them do their work! 

Then we will begin building a world ! 

People often quote to me as if it were on the other side — when 
I fall to trying to say a thing like this in this chapter about the 
Pennsylvania — that famous remark of Paul's: "Spiritual things 
are spiritually discerned.'* 

But that is just it. On its practical side what Paul means is 
that only spiritual genius can express material genius. The 
spirit of the Pennsylvania Railroad, such a majestic brute 
sprawling out in the middle of our modern life, so bewildered and 
humble, so wistful, so godlike-childish before God and man, be- 
fore the twentieth century and the reach of the years ahead — the 
Pennsylvania Railroad is a spirit that could only begin to hope to 
be discerned, comprehended and expressed by a master of mod- 
ern spiritual genius such as this clumsy big-infant world as yet 
has only begun to begin to guess. 

But it is what is coming to America. It is what America is for 
in literature. And if literary artists of our time do not face 
toward it, and do not stop facing away from it, there is soon going 
to be nothing in this world for which either railway managers or 
artists will have to live. American railway managers without 
their poets are soon to be as lonely, as shut in and inefficient in 
their own century and in their own country and in their own 
calling as poets are. 

We poets are always saying we are lonely. It serves us right. 
We should be busy making a world in which we can feel at home 
and which will feel at home with us. The more our American 



WHY AN ADVERTISING MAN PRAYS 241 

poets persist in cutting off as unpoetic the actual lives of two 
hundred and fifty thousand men on a railroad and looking beauti- 
fully and sweetly past them for some poetry to hand gracefully 
out to them, the lonelier they are going to get. 

The word poet — I have just looked it up (to be sure) in a very 
lively book at my side by Noah Webster — means "maker." 



XVI 

WHY HE SINGS 

I am making a stand or trying to express as I see it the stand 
about me a whole world is instinctively making to-day for the 
material value of the soul, for the grip on the fate of the physical 
world of the human spirit, or the empire at last of spiritual 
things — of things that can be only discerned and that can be 
only expressed by spiritual men. 

If Isaiah, the supreme master of expression among his people, 
were living to-day, he would be in a position owing to the in- 
vention of advertising to do what he tried to do. 

All that Isaiah's power of expression needed was capitalizing, 
to have saved his nation from destruction, from being scattered 
over the face of the earth, from living two thousand years in the 
despised quarters of other people's great cities, and from cring- 
ing about in the moral backyards of other nations. Capitalizing 
Isaiah's power of expression, printing what he had to say so that 
it could be read aloud to the people in the streets, read over and 
over to the people in the great houses, in the little huts, in the 
tents, and in the fields, would have turned the whole course of 
history. 

History turned as on a pivot for a little while there in Judea on 
the power of a man named Isaiah to use words. But without 
capital to buy and engage millions of little beginning wedges of 
attention with, and without a printing press to carry his voice to 
thousands who were not there, Isaiah had — the usual tritely dis- 
couraged respectable fate of all prophets of not being heard by 
his own people, of speaking on paper after he was dead — the fate 
of being mere literature, a mighty resounding voice through 

242 



N WHY HE SINGS 243 

all nations, through all times, of a nation that might have 
been. 

In America we will not do this. We will write the literature of 
a nation that shall be. 

If Isaiah were in America to-day, and one single one of our 
seven thousand armoured millionaires were to step out from the 
other six thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, hand him 
twenty million dollars' worth of attention-space in this country 
— hand him as it were a sky to write on, hand him a great land- 
scape of men and women, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and 
all the hills, mighty valleys, mountain-tops of attention — he 
would write on the earth as with an iron pen, as in the blood 
of great cities the word of God. Then the other six thousand 
nine hundred and ninety-nine millionaires, before the Word and 
in the presence of the will of the people, would do what Isaiah 
said. 



I desire, claim, and announce the right of the soul in the world 
to control and master the body of the world as the soul of a 
man controls and masters the body of a man. 

I announce a masterful world. 

The men who hold themselves as the masters of this world 
are not masterful men. 

Look at their world ! 

It is slovenly and unworthy of the men of the spirit to 
fall back on the claim that the soul on any subject, item 
by item, masters — always masters the world — in a thousand 
years. 

I announce that it shall master the world now, that before 
our own eyes and while we each of us yet live, the balance of 
power among men and all the affairs of men shall be held and 
wielded by the see-ers and by the artists, by the word-pickers, 
the radium-owners, the symbol-choosers, the men who can pick 
out the little magical symbols in the lives of men that express 



244 WE 

their souls to themselves, the men that make men the masters 
of their fate, the lords of their own attention, the authors of 
their own history, and part builders with God of the future of 
their own nation — steerers of attention to great peoples, and 
helmsmen of a world. 



XVII 
WHY HE WORKS 

When I had presented some of the ideas in this book about 
the Ford car to an audience of business men the other night and 
was coming away with one of them, he asked me if what I had 
given them about Ford was a part of my new book. 

I said Yes. He thought it would not do. 

When I asked him why, he said such things were not done, 
that it would upset the whole business world to have authors 
get into the habit of butting in, of going about sorting out 
wholesale, national or international advertising in this way 
— hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of it perhaps for 
nothing. 

I made a rather lame answer to his objection. I brooded on 
it on the way home that night and wondered what I should have 
said. 

Then I sat down the next morning and wrote this — the last 
chapter on The Art of Making Things Happen. 



I ride daily in a Ford Sedan car up and down the roads 
around Mount Tom. Every now and then as I watch the cars 
go past I think what it would mean to me if all the people in 
the Fords could be thinking the things that I am thinking. I 
know that this is a highly improper thought and is really taking 
liberties with the people in Ford cars, but in flashes I do do it. 
I even venture into other cars, the Coles and the Packards and 
Raniers, with thoughts of how fine it would be to sit snug and 
tight in my little Ford chugging along way over on my side of 

245 



246 ^VE 

the road and have them— the great, noble cars— go lunging 
gloriously, dazzlingly past me, full of my Thoughts! 

I wish my interpretation of the way Henry Ford gets his car 
made, the gist of former chapters in this book boiled down into 
ten words, could be posted up in white and blue porcelain letters 
on every car with a little American flag on it. 

Of course I could select other manufacturers. 

I would like to. 

I would like to put up a few words in subdued decorative 
lettering on every Packard piano, telling every man who buys 
a Packard piano or who sits down to one, things about the way 
the piano is made that would make him feel like almost break- 
ing out and singing while playing on it. 

I might have selected the Packard piano. But the Packard 
piano does not fly about everywhere for me like the Ford car. 
I could not hope to use it as a ready-made, illimitable, omni- 
present billboard for my ideas — as a vast flock of sandwich 
men on every highway of the world fronting up my religion 
before the faces of men. It is stationary and unobtrusive and 
comparatively few people know about the Packard piano yet. 

In the same way also I have often wished there were some 
way of making millions of McElwain shoes go illuminatingly up 
and down the pavements of a thousand cities, telling millions 
of the people trooping by in McElwain shoes what the workmen 
and foremen in the McElwain factory are doing to change the 
face of the earth by the way they make shoes. But nobody 
notices shoes as compared with automobiles. 

I want the best billboard there is. I want a billboard that 
flies innumerably about, that flings itself up in vast stretches, 
which in illimitable, ceaseless little black waves streams into 
people's faces, across people's lives — a billboard which hums and 
murmurs in everybody's ears like the Ford car every two 
minutes a day — as my bulletin board on which I would post my 
interpretation of the human heart and send my inmost hopes 
and prayers thronging through the streets. And here is Henry 



WHY HE WORKS 247 

Ford's car ready-made to my hand. It would be a mere con- 
vention to keep from using it. To use it would be to give my 
religion every morning, noon and night, millions of free rides 
around a world. If incidentally I am giving a Ford car a free 
ride and an open road on my religion, I am more than glad. 



This is the situation as I see it. 

It is a definite situation I face — as a man who is making a 
career out of expressing, interpreting his own age, and who is 
trying to possess his soul, in the world as it is. Every time I 
take a look at this world as it is, I find that our regular conven- 
tional business in America is being rvm on a poor, lazj', scared 
Wall Street theory of human nature. 

I see everybody about me already seeing, however gropingly, 
that our regular conventional business in America ought to be 
tilted up and lifted over bodily, ought to get new foundations, 
get Wall Street pried out from under it and get Wilbur Wrights, 
Luther Burbanks, Edisons and Henry Fords put in instead. 

This prying Wall Street out is a matter of news, a huge 
masterpiece of getting the attention of the world fixed. What 
is the main thing this man needs to do his work? He needs 
Henry Ford. 

Henry Ford has pried out Wall Street from under his own 
business — (the scared part of Wall Street) and is running his 
business successfully on the theory that human nature is good. 
In other words, Henry Ford has expressed my soul for me in his 
factory. And now I want to turn it around and express Henry 
Ford's factory in my book, relate his factory to a century, to a 
nation, connect it up with the peace of nations and the fate of a 
world. I would like to put the factory under a sounding-board 
or in a megaphone, shout it from the housetops and upon the 
roofs of Boards of Trade, and even upon the slow, dreamy 
steeples of the churches that here, at last, in Detroit, U. S. A., 
there is a factory that is saying We, that is based on peace 



248 WE 

between classes, and that the factory is making fifteen hundred 
cars and eighteen thousand men a day. And that for every bit 
of work, every good helpful stroke the factory puts in on the 
men, the men are putting back three strokes on their factory 
work, one stroke on the Ford car, one on their employer's and 
employee's mutual belief in men, and one more little extra blow 
on their own lives and on themselves, until I have seen or seemed 
to see at last the whole piled-up huge institution, all its glass 
and iron, all its smoke and sunshine in it, and all the men and 
machines in it putting in the biggest stretches of work in shap- 
ing out a great nation, except George Washington's, or possibly 
Lincoln's, that has been started yet. 

America is in a state of revolution, and the revolution has got 
to be put into a book so that all men to-day shall know and 
understand and believe what is happening to them and that 
when we are dead there shall be a record of it, of how human 
nature in the year 1915 rebelled, lifted itself up and broke into 
the business world, began to make business the biggest and hap- 
piest, youngest and most powerful of all the great human arts 
and professions — as full of ideals as falling in love, and pursued 
as shrewdly and as passionately and with as high enthusiasms 
and with as noble hearts. 



The best and most legitimate advertisement of the Ford car 
is the way the workmen work in the factory. It is an advertise- 
ment that renders a personal service to the daily life of the 
people to whom it is advertised. The Ford car tells every man 
something about human nature and about business that he 
would like to believe and does not dare. 

OwTiing or driving a Ford car is a mere incident in the way one 
feels about the world when one rides around in it thinking how 
it was made. Henry Ford's workmen are the best advertise- 
ment of his factory because they make the kind of an adver- 
tisement every man takes personally and talks about as a 



WHY HE WORKS 249 

personal affair. Every man feels his whole life, his life's theory, 
the underpinning of his life, the way he does his business, as- 
sailed and attacked and overhauled by Henry Ford, the way 
Henry Ford and Henry Ford's workmen, together, are making 
a Ford car. Mr. Ford instead of doing the conventional thing 
and advertising his car is advertising his employees. Mr. Ford 
has done away with a forty-year deadline for a workingman. 
He makes him keep on living. In other words, the advertising 
that Mr. Ford gets in this way is free advertising and has a 
right to be free, because it is personal, national, international 
news to every man living. The people who are advertised to are 
filled full of news too good to believe at first. Then they go 
ahead and do the advertising of the Ford car themselves. 

The question is how to start people up. There are hundreds 
of thousands of us who are as much interested as Ford is, in 
answering the question: "How can we get a hundred million 
people on five continents to acting as the advertising agents 
(free) of the Ford car?" 

Who is there who can start the public up, who can startle 
the people everywhere in clubs, in streets, in restaurants, and 
in good faith set them to acting as advertising agents for nothing 
of the Ford car? 

Only a man who is doing it for nothing himself can get other 
people to do it for nothing. 

Who is the man who can be found to do a thing like this for 
nothing? He will have to be a man who cannot be given a 
paid look and who is obviously working for a reward bigger than 
any company would think of trying to pay him. 

He will have to be believed in by people automatically. Peo- 
ple must see that the work he is doing cannot be done without 
advertising Ford, that he will have to make Ford known as an 
organic part of his own work, whether he wants to or not. 

Who is this man? and how can he be found? 

This is where I have innocently thought that perhaps I and 
my little book might come in! I cannot help writing about 



250 WE 

Mr. Ford and calling attention to Mr. Ford, to express my be- 
lief of what is going to happen, any more than I can help writing 
about Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Carnegie to express my belief 
of what has got through happening. 

Every time I go out upon the streets and see that vast homely 
happy family of Ford cars, their crowded overflowing faces 
flocking past or every time I go flying out on the country roads 
and see all these countless crowds — these hopeful beginning 
people, just grimly holding on by their fists to the Motor World, 
the countless boyish motorists practising away at being motor- 
ists on their little Fords like little boys on tin whistles, I am 
happy thinking that perhaps some day everything I believe 
about Henry Ford for the world and for myself, they will 
believe for the world and for themselves, too. They will roll 
about believing it. I look in their faces with a strange glad- 
ness. 

If every man who rides in a Ford car or who has things de- 
livered to him in a Ford car, or who meets a Ford car in the 
road would see Henry Ford as I do, would read these chapters, 
believe what I say about him and remember it next time he 
makes a deal in his business, I shall not have lived in vain. If 
he does not believe my interpretation of Henry Ford I want 
to follow him up with a book and ask why. If he does not 
believe in what Henry Ford is doing, I will ask him to criticise 
by going Henry Ford one better. No one would be better 
pleased than Henry Ford to be criticised in this way. In 
the meantime I have selected Henry Ford because the thing 
that he has been doing is the largest one single, mutual, 
industrial, economic and great common spiritual experience 
a whole world has been having together, is the plainest 
and loudest and most credible general statement of the 
idea that in this book I am trying to express, to apply, to 
connect up, to make happen, to modulate into every business 
in the world. To the Henry Ford each other line of business is 
gomg to have, and who is working out his technique in his own 



WHY HE WORKS 251 

special kind of workmen and customers, and who is now as 
obscure as Henry Ford was ten years ago, I send greeting. As 
an advertising agent for men who are making money out of 
raising the credit of human nature, for men who are making 
disinterestedness work as much better than selfishness as it 
was intended to work, for men who are making their business as 
great-hearted as they are themselves, who are making their 
business an art-form for expressing themselves and expressing 
the American people, for men who are making their business 
to-day go around the world as one of the flags of the nation, as 
one of the symbols of the freedom, the peace, dignity and 
mighty-heartedness of the American people — for these men I 
shall be in the field with a new book all the rest of my life. In 
speaking for Henry Ford to-day I am speaking for them. 

All any manufacturer has to do who criticises me for adver- 
tising Mr. Ford's factory is to do things that will drive me into 
advertising his. 

In the meantime as I go riding about in my Ford car, I reek 
with pride! It's a Rolls-Royce to me! I feel as in a ship of 
State! I feel gathered about in the flag of my native country 
. and when I see on the long shiny State Road all the 
great glorious silent cars go past — those graceful, serene sailing 
swans of speed, I am not afraid of them any longer now, and 
when I meet or when I join in with all that vast hovering flock or 
flutter of my brother forders paddling gayly in their little 
fordlets up and down the streets, I feel at home and proud and 
happy. I sit still behind my wind-shield and watch my native 
land go by. I feel as if I were looking my queer, happy, hopeful 
country in the face. A composite of the people in the Ford 
cars in America to-day would be the best photograph America 

has ever had taken yet After all, I am a boy at heart, 

a bread-and-molasses boy. As I watch the big proud bitter 
cars go by, I glory daily in the little one — the one Lincoln 
would have begun in. I watch the stream of their faces 
and pray and sing — (rather low, of course) ... all 



252 WE 

that hopeful, homely family of onwardness — onward any old 
way, but onward . . . how I know them and love them! 
I want to be inside and at heart like them and belong with 
them . . . their joviality, their defiance of laughter, their 
forgetting of the Ford jokes in the Ford comforts, laughing 
back at the small boys jeering at them from the curb for being 
in Fords — thousands of them glad, busy, unconscious, God bless 
them! They are not ashamed of the little straight-away car 
in its. shirt sleeves ! They are not minding the people in half- 
paid-for Coles who would ride in Fords if they dared. . . . 

I have seen my vision flowing in the streets of those who shall 
believe what I believe. . . who like a vast shuttle of my faith 
shall go weaving my prayer for me and my song for me up 
and down the roads of a world ! 



LOOK II 

ADVERTISING A NATION 

I 

WITH GUNS AND BILLBOARDS 

WAR is the failure of a world's spiritual billboards to 
advertise what each nation really has for the others 
that the others really want. 
The time is coming when great engineers of each nation will 
lift a super-dreadnought from out of the sea, transport it to each 
nation's capital, put it in front of its palaces of kings or of 
the people on huge stays, or upon a drydock in a park, one in 
Washington, one in Berlin, one in Paris, and in Petrograd. In 
a hundred years people in each nation will go by it, will stand 
and look up at it with wonder as the nation's monument to 
Peace, or rather as the world's monument or reminder for each 
nation to have. Across the Monument will be the words : 



TO NINETEEN FIFTEEN 

— a Monument to the Supreme Failure of the Advertising men of 
all nations— in 1915, to make their Nations Known to one another 
and to get their Nations to Express Themselves. 



People will look at the dreadnought and say: "Because we 
could not express ourselves, because we could not make any 
nation look, we had to try to get nations to look at us with 
monstrous stupid attention-machines like this." 

People will go by as in a museum, and with their heads thrown 

253 



254 WE 

back will stand and stare at the dreadnoughts like mastodons 
— curious colossal archaic engines with which their fathers 
expressed themselves, thundered their religion at the gates of 
nations and blew their souls about the world. 

In the meantime, the dreadnoughts are not engaged in being 
monuments. Daily before our eyes, on the high, sunlit seas, 
they go about, 'i'he Queen Elizabeth spends a million and a 
quarter dollars an hour (with all her guns in action) in trying 
to g(^t noticed. 

She cries in the sunshine on the high seas to the sky: "Eng- 
land! England! England!" 

Nobody notices. It sounds rather feeble on the sky. The 
sky is of brass. 

Germany has another crying to the sky, too: "Fatherland! 
Fatherland ! Fatherland ! " 

They drown each other out. Nobody listens. 

And even if they did, what of it? 

Is the voice really the voice of England? 

Is the idea it voices really the idea of England? Is it like 
England? 

Tliey have an Idiot Whistle on the brush factory here in 
Northampton (a lingering, leering, mocking howl or siren) 
which rolls around on the air for five miles at seven o'clock 
every morning and which is supposed to be the voice of the 
Floren(*e Manufacturing Company lovingly, respectfully calling 
their men to their work. 

I often think of it as the voice of Mr. the president 

(a pleasant, harmonious gentleman I occasionally see in eve- 
ning dress at a symphony concert), and I wonder why he doesn't 
have this ghoulish unearthly tone he represents himself to his 
workmen with and that he represents the dignity of Labour 
with — modulated or stopped. 

I feel the same way about England's trying to express her- 
self, trying to shout about herself, make everybody notice her, 
be afraid of her, see what she is like, in these pathetic, helpless, 



WITH GUNS AND BILLBOARDS ^55 

wistful million-dollar croakings on the sky — from a dread- 
nought! 

What made anybody notice the sinking of the Lusitania ? 
What is it about the Lusitania that will be eloquent forever? 

It was not the physical force in it. It was not the mean little 
cowardly thrust and shout from a boat hiding under water. 

It was the joy of the (jerman people — the ringing of the bells 
in a thousand steeples — over the drowning of twelve hundred 
innocent men, women and children. It was the editorials in 
a thousand German newspapers. It was Germany's cry of 
joy as she committed suicide, as she lifted up twelve hundred 
innocent men and women, a hundred and fifty babies, flung 
them aghast upon the sea, and then swung her hat before the 
world and said: '* Look! Look! Oh, World! This is what 
Germany is like!" 

The only thing that gives any value or power to physical 
force is what people think a})out it. The only force is Thought. 
It is not Germany's guns that Europe is fighting. It is Lis- 
sauer's chant of hate on the lips of her people. 

It was a terrible thing for Germany to kill twelve hundred 
innocent men and women of other nations because they got in 
her way, but after all it was only a subtle, almost delicate and 
slight, expression or self- revelation of the heaped-up thoughts 
and feelings of rage and joy and hatred, (Germany has had 
about it. It was Germany's soul that counted. It was what 
Germany meant by the Lusitania that was impressive. It was 
the last desi)airing self-destruction of seventy million i)eople — 
of a nation — with one speechless, awful, immortal crash of 
cowardice and howl of victory, falling back before the heights 
of the human spirit into eternal defeat! 



This nation does not i)ropose to believe or to take seriously 
or personally some of the things that are happening to other 
nations to-day. We i)roi)ose to have different things happen. 



256 WE 

And by advertising for enough people in this nation and other 
nations to join with us and make them happen, we shall yet 
share with God, as America was meant to share, in the shaping 
of the destiny of a world. 

We decline to believe that Germany and England and Russia 
and France are engaged to-day in expressing German men, 
Englishmen, Russians, Frenchmen, under the forms of expres- 
sion which they have chosen to use. America at heart to her 
last man will stand up for German human nature and for English 
human nature. We will not judge nations in the moments of 
their despair and dumbness when they stutter in the language 
of force, in the language of ages long gone by, ideas of truth, 
liberty, of social and industrial need and power that have only 
begun to be conceived, in the age in which we live, and which 
can only hope to be expressed in the latest forms of expression 
and the latest means of attracting attention the age in which 
we live can command. 

America believes what the North German Lloyd ships have 
been telling us all these years what the Germans are like. We 
only propose to believe about Germans what Germany says 
when she is speaking about herself in her senses and when she is 
using the latest forms of expressing the latest powers of a great 
people. The ideas about herself she is trying to express with 
guns we do not believe about her. The worse muss in express-- 
ing German human nature Germany makes, as long as she is 
trying to express it with guns, the better for Germany and for all 
of us. We like to think of Germany as she was. We look 
forward to Germany as she will be when she again expresses 
herself. 

If it is true, as many say, that she is expressing her real 
self with guns, we will wait to judge. We will let her prove it 
to us by keeping on with the guns very long, and by clinging 
to the guns more than other nations when she is through. In 
the meantime we will stand by her and hope (even though we 
fight we will stand by her and hope) for Germany to express 



WITH GUNS AND BILLBOARDS 257 

herself. We want her to unloose her ships by the wharves of 
New York once more and let their mighty funnels beckon to the 
sky and beckon to us — of what Germany is like. Perhaps we 
shall yet see her ships sailing in and out the harbour contra- 
dicting Bernhardi to the skyscrapers, taking back Lissauer's 
chant of hate up and down the cities of a world and sorrowing 
for the Lusitaiiia in the middle of the sea. 

War is a crazed expression and it drives people into crazed 
ideas to express. 

War is the tragic breakdown of the art-forms of nations, the 
collapse of international advertising. War is the failure of the 
nation's spiritual billboards to advertise the qualities and powers 
of her people, to make known what each nation has for the 
others that the others really want. 

I am going to stand out for America's getting the attention 
of the world the way Detroit has got the attention of America. 

America will advertise the way Detroit advertises. 

Seventy -five per cent, of all cars in America are made in 
Detroit. When I get into my Detroit car and roll down the 
street, on the average the first three cars I meet are from De- 
troit, Michigan. ''Detroit does all these," I think. W^hen I 
meet the fourth one, I look at the fourth one and think, "It 
takes all the cities of the United States put together to do this 
one. 

One puts in quite a little time nowadays on the road, whizzing 
past cars. One spends three fourths of one's time whizzing past 
Detroit, Michigan. That flash of whistle and whir, swift 
shadow — that voice as of many winds, of boundless little echoes 
one just passed, now half a mile back down the road in a kind 
of businesslike halo of dust (three chances out of four), was 
Detroit, Michigan! 

On a lonely road at night you see four big eyes and a glare 
ahead out in that long aisle through the blackness. A second 
more — a glorious buzz — a vast innumerable swish of air. . . . 
You look back: a little faint red dot ... a roar . . . 



258 WE 

and what was it . . . three chances out of ten — this thing 
that flashed past you? What was it? It was a radiant bit — a 
flying fragment of Michigan. Forty thousand men at work 
through all those little cities of machines — of windows — making 
fragments of Michigan for a whole world to ride around in. 
Hundreds of thousands of people seated in them, night after 
night, flashing about, laughing happily — on those escaped 
comets, those mighty little whirls thrown off Detroit, Michigan. 



n 

WITH FACES AND BOOKS 

Mfo Gardner seemed worried in Boston the other night be- 
cause the Bliicher, the German ship that was sunk because it was 
slow, was five miles faster than anything in the American Navy. 

Mr. Gardner was also scared apparently by our little army 
of seventy -five thousand men. 

He asked how we proposed to meet the enemy. He said, 
with fire in his eyes and a roll in his voice, to a poor helpless 
audience: "What do you propose to have us do. ^^ Do you pro- 
pose to have us stand up and meet the foe, when it comes up to 
shoot, with a roll of Sunday-school signatures and an address 
from Chautauqua?" 

I think it would be just the thing. Let the Sunday-school chil- 
dren stand up with their signed petition in their hands. Then let 
the enemy aim their rifles at the Sunday-school children. Then 
let this enemy shoot the Sunday-school children if they dare. 

There are certain other arrangements for such a battle I 
would want to arrange, I think. 

First. I would have several sets of moving-picture machines 
placed on the hills up on both sides and others at close range, so 
that every village in the whole world would be provided for a 
thousand years with pictures of the soldiers shooting the children 
with their petition in their hands. 

Second. I would have delegates from all nations up on the 
hills in reserved seats. They would return and give descriptions 
at home of the soldiers shooting the children. 

Third. I would get together two companies of poets (if I 
could find any who believed in poetry enough to do it) and have 

259 



260 WE 

them stationed on the hills — one poet from every nation. They 
would pour out the courage of the soldiers shooting children into 
song. They would make the soldiers shooting the children a 
part of the living literature of all nations. 

Fourth. I would spend a million dollars in getting the names 
and addresses of as many soldiers as possible pictured in the act 
of shooting the children. The money could be spent in going 
about the enemy's country and matching up the photographs 
with their originals, and then distributing about their native 
towns, where everybody knew them, the pictures of each soldier 
shooting the children. 

The way to do with an enemy is to annihilate him before 
attack begins. What really works is to attack the soldier's 
imagination before he fights. England is spending ten dollars a 
day per English soldier already. Suppose she spends five dollars 
on each German soldier — hands five dollars a day over to the 
German Government to be spent on travelling expenses and 
reading matter for this German to know England. Let England 
say : " Come over here and feel friendly, make us feel friendly and 
have it out with us — we will pay you five dollars a day for it." 
This would not only be cheaper than ten dollars a day spent on 
having each Englishman stand up to be shot, but it would be 
precisely to the point and would get the attention, if not of all 
Germany, of enough Germans to swing the nation. 

This may sound vague, but it takes organization, a huge 
mutual-attention machine. Even if it cost $50,000,000 a day to 
the nations contributing to it, it would be cheaper than the pres- 
ent mutual-inattention machines, or machines for shooting at- 
tention away, that are being used now. 

Fifth. Mr. Gardner would probably not be impressed by 
pamphlets and books or by moving pictures as a means of keep- 
ing an enemy off. 

He would probably be particularly sarcastic about a paper 
book. 

He would probably say that a book is too vague and slow an 



WITH FACES AND BOOKS 261 

influence, a kind of literary dribbling through people's minds, 
and that a book could not be concentrated to the defense of one 
great nation from another. 

Mr. Gardner would not rely much on a book to defend America 
with, as a substitute for a dozen dreadnoughts and half a 
million men. 

But I do not think the facts would back up Mr. Gardner in 
this attitude toward books. Books do things. They are even 
to-day before our eyes the supreme concentration, the supreme 
materialization in this world, of human power. The material 
things they do can even be weighed off in the eyes of a world in 
dollars and cents. England is spending ten million dollars a day 
— every day now — indefinitely in fighting three books : one book 
by an obscure German named Bernhardi, another book by a 
philosopher named Nietzsche, and another book by a professor 
named Treitschke. Certainly as long as the nations of Europe 
are every day before our eyes spending fifty million dollars a day 
on doing what three books have made them believe they have 
got to do, it is hardly an opportune time for Mr. Gardner or any 
one else to scoff at what books can do, to feel faint-hearted about 
the power of books to defend, assail, or endanger mighty peoples, 
and to cast into the balance the fate of nations. 

This war is to be known in history as the Three Books War. 

It is an interpretation of the German character that the world 
is spending fifty million dollars a day shooting at. It was only 
because people believed these three books that it was possible to 
start the war, and it is only because people believe them now still 
more and because the German people seem to be backing — poor 
people! — the books up, that it has become possible for the Allies 
to have the moral backbone, the religious fervor, that alone 
could keep the fight going. 



I believe that a single book in America which shall be strewn 
and sown by our Government through all the world — a single 



262 WE 

book which shall be a living portrait of the temperament of 
America, of the daily mood, the genius of hope, of the peaceful 
deep and quiet and busy fearlessness that runs through the 
hearts of our people — would defend this nation from all other 
nations. 

Dreadnoughts and armies would only expose it. 

As a single book, Bernhardi, for instance, has exposed Ger- 
many, so could a single book defend America. The problem of 
peace the next hundred years in America is the problem of find- 
ing a man who in expressing and revealing himself shall express 
and reveal his nation. 

A crowd of seventy million men and women called Germany 
could not hope to know a crowd of ninety million men and 
women called America, but if they knew more or less vividly and 
personally one man who is essentially the spirit, the temperament 
of them all, we would have the spectacle three thousand miles 
wide — three thousand miles across the sea — of seventy million 
people all being intimate with ninety million people. 

The English are fighting Germany because they believe that 
Bernhardi has given a precise portrait of what the Germans are 
like. Many German officers are fighting the English and shoot- 
ing them down as snobs and hypocrites because they have be- 
lieved and passed on to the people the idea that Thackeray has 
drawn a precise portrait of what Englishmen are like. 

If eleven nations can be set to gathering themselves together 
in a stupendous crash, in a national concentration such as the 
world has never dreamed of — if eleven nations can be set to 
spending fifty million dollars a day to fight a book or so in Ger- 
many or a book or so in England — it is hardly necessary to sug- 
gest the bottomless material energy and vastness of reach of 
little spiritual quirls of ink, or of what could be done by really 
great books, by books which with real genius and lovableness and 
contagiousness could be thrown out by a nation to defend itself, 
books that paint the portrait of a nation so that people in the 
nation would be defended by being known and loved, by being 



WITH FACES AND BOOKS 263 

revealed to men of other nations as blundering but trying, pro- 
voking but lovable fellow human beings. 

Of course this power to paint the portrait, the true portrait, of 
a nation out of the huddled-up chaos of seventy million faces 
turns in the last analysis upon the imaginative power or genius in 
some man to fight out for himself in spite of his environment a 
true perspective. This fighting quality in the man of genius 
which makes it possible for him to be a personality, to have a 
free, noble, unenslaved imagination so that perspective at last 
becomes possible to him and can become at last a daily habit 
with him, so that he can make a sketch of a great people that will 
make them feared and loved — that would make all a world stand 
by them, serve them, and protect them — a man like this is not a 
form of self-defense a nation can hope to have without prayer 
and sacrifice, experiment, hope, and, above all, without seeing 
what such a man is for, and what he can do. But a nation 
should at least begin to provide such a man by seeing and making 
him see how much he is needed. 

A nation that wants a vast standing army and a huge navy 
like this, as it were — -a line of coast defenses like this — all con- 
centrated, all done up in a few thousand words on paper by one 
man, can only hope to produce such a man by seeing what he 
could do and what he would save the nation's doing and by look- 
ing with expectation and with challenge upon its literature. 

I have believed that as time goes on it is to the artist, to the 
nation's expert in perspective, and not to the soldier, that this 
nation and Mr. Gardner will look and be glad to look for the de- 
fense of the country. 

Nations are endangered and attacked because they cannot see 
themselves and see one another and see the events that are hap- 
pening before their eyes in perspective. 

Only a man who is an expert and specialist in seeing perspec- 
tives in human nature can hope to see two nations and what is 
happening to them in perspective, and only a man who is a 
trained master in expressing a perspective when he gets it can 



264 WE 

hope to get anybody else in a time of stress to notice his per- 
spective or to use it. 

The power of perspective in this connection may be said to be 
the power of seeing and expressing what two nations would wish 
they had done fifty years afterward. 

Perspective always has regular provision made for it by people. 
The newspaper furnishes perspective a few hours afterward; the 
magazine a few days afterward. 

Perspective fifty years afterward can be got for us by the his- 
torian. What a poet seems to be for is to hand over to us bodily 
our perspective now — to express to two nations what they w^ould 
wish they had done in fifty years, so that they will see it and do it 
now. 

This makes the poet or the artist to-day rather more impor- 
tant than he has usually been to nations before. A nation's litera- 
ture is ceasing to be looked upon as one of the national graces 

Literature is the art of taking what has just happened and, by 
sheer lift and range of imagination, laying it out in its perspec- 
tive in spite of itself and in spite of everybody. Literature is the 
art of arranging, out of what has just happened, what has got to 
happen. 

I have spent twenty years and written six books exalting 
every other man's profession, in trying to show that every man's 
profession and every man's trade and calling in this world is an 
art-form, capable of expressing him vigorously, deeply, inti- 
mately, and of fulfilling him and his nation together. 

Perhaps I may say a word now for my own calling and my 
vision of my own profession in the next hundred years. 

Literature by modern nations, after this last fiasco of war, is 
about to be taken seriously. It is to be taken in the twentieth 
century as the nation's means of self-defense. 

I have seen that after this war is over the artist is through 
dallying. I have seen that the man who works in literature is no 
longer to be regarded as the national paperhanger, or decorator, 
or painter in water colours of the friezes of nations. 



WITH FACES AND BOOKS 265 

Literature after this war, is to be looked upon as a man's busi- 
ness. It is the art of arranging out of what has just happened, 
what has got to happen. 

It is to be the most colossal, most subtle, penetrating expres- 
sion of a man's will, of a man's will and of his vision wrought to- 
gether, that men know. 

It is to be the life-calling of the artist to melt and weld in his 
heart the fate of nations, to work in cosmic spiritual forces, to 
precipitate new spiritual and new material worlds. As stars are 
struck off and swung out, he shall create new worlds, he shall set 
his will and his vision in motion together, light and heat, dynamo 
and apocalypse, whirling and revolving together, until at last, his 
will and vision working together, he shall create new wills for 
men, new visions for men — shall whirl up new men and new 
wills, new mutual wills, new nations on the earth ! 

He shall whirl up the new nations by expressing intimately, 
colossally, with fear and with love, the nations that are. 

The reason that the soldier is going by is that by temperament 
and training he is the man of all others to-day who cannot do 
this. He does not represent and cannot express people. People 
can only be defended in this machine world by men who can ex- 
press them and by men who can help them to express themselves. 



Ill 

WITH HYENAS 

Ages ago the best men in the world were soldiers. When men 
looked up to them there was something about them that made all 
other men want to be soldiers, too, and expect to be soldiers. 
Ages ago soldiers expressed nations. It was because soldiers ex- 
pressed nations that they secured results for them. A nation's 
soldiers were the best advertisements of what the nation was 
like. 

The memory and anticipation of her soldiers, the sight of her 
soldiers marching peacefully through the streets with colours 
flying and bands of music playing — ages ago — were the best and 
most true presentation or portrait of the spirit and temper of a 
people, of the representative virtues and gifts of the men of a 
nation to be feared and loved, that the nation had. 

In a machine age, an age of invention and organization, an 
age of machinery for acting together, all men of special power in 
getting results are experts and geniuses in team-work, in express- 
ing themselves and others together. It is the inventors of ma- 
chines, of organized ideas, the inventors of power-houses of 
mutual attention, the builders of engines of seeing together who 
secure results for nations. 

Only tenth-rate men can be hired to be privates in war to- 
day, and only fifth-rate men can be found to organize men 
against one another or to lead men against one another. 

Leading men together is interesting and powerful and throws 
a man, instantly and for life, with the men who are worth 
knowing. Leading men together expresses a man, helps him 
to express his world, and makes his career great and happy. 

266 



WITH HYENAS 267 

And all men envy him and want to be like him. He becomes 
a Crowd-man. 

Everybody understands him. He understands everybody. 
It is this man or type of man who is becoming before our eyes 
in every nation its most national, its most representative man. 

The weakness of being a soldier is that to-day there is not 
really anybody in a nation, not even himself, that a soldier can 
be said to represent. He represents a narrow extraordinary 
and momentary idea or mood in men — the idea of killing people 
as a way of impressing them. This extremely rare idea, which 
most people have never even had a flash of more than once in 
their lives, is all a soldier represents and all he can express. 

A soldier is so unrepresentative that truly modern men feel 
lonely with him. As it is his business as a soldier, his special 
profession, to make men feel lonely with him, he is supposed to 
like it and to do it very well. 

Mr. Gardner's idea that the United States should hunt up 
and gather together and train in its schools and colleges from 
now on a very large number of men like this, that the United 
States should set thousands of young men in every State to 
thinking in uniforms and arguing with guns in this lonely way, 
and keep them engaged all the rest of their lives in making 
America look impressive to other nations, is not practical, for 
two reasons : the first is that we will not look impressive to other 
nations in this way, and the second is that the men Mr. Gardner 
wants in a country like this, for this purpovse, are not being pro- 
duced by this country. 

It is hard to find anybody in America who understands him- 
self so little and understands others so little that he will be a 
soldier. 

The reason a soldier does not have any real power to-day and 
does not represent anybody is that he does not begin to repre- 
sent himself. At best he is a real, honest, flesh-and-blood man 
who has forced himself, or let himself be forced by circumstances, 
to be a monster — a man who has entered into a pathetic absurd 



268 WE 

task of trying to be as good a hyena as he can for God and 
humanity. 

Of course a man can only hope to make at best a very poor 
and somewhat mixed imitation of a hyena. The hyena is to be 
looked up to in his way. He at least takes the best possible 
means at his disposal of accomplishing his particular end, and 
a man who is being a hyena to serve the ends of humanity does 
not. His end is to make men keep from attacking him. He 
throws away his best means of making men not want or not 
dare to attack him — his brains — and takes up means that spe- 
cifically make men make up their minds that they will attack 
him, means that make men feel (with all these dreadnoughts 
and claws and things he has and that he believes in) they must 
wipe him and wipe all his people off the face of the earth. 

Not representing anybody or expressing anybody in America 
in the twentieth century, the soldier is losing his value as a 
means of national defense. 



IV 
WITH FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS 

It seems to me that in these next few pages I am going in a 
straight Hne, almost a short cut, to my subject, but I know that 

to Professor or to Judge it will surely seem 

and be one of those little guilty but half -happy detours I make 
and always seem to have to make when I see a Subject, a stern 
Subject, set squarely and honestly in front of me, glaring at me, 
right in the middle of the road, that has got to be dealt with. 

Anyone can skip to — I should think — to about page 274. 

I am planning to have roses, growing wild and of themselves 
down the terrace in front of my house and reaching down over 
the wall to the road where everybody goes by. If people tell 
me that my rosebushes will be stripped, I will put up a sign 
which will say to people: 



PLEASE TAKE ONE ROSE 
IF YOU THINK THERE ARE ENOUGH 



I have been wondering what to do about the people who enter 
my little piece of ground or who cross it before my eyes. (I do 
not love all crowds everywhere all the time.) My first idea had 
been to put up signs in the curve of the driveway. What gets 
the attention of one person does not necessarily get another's, 
and I had thought I would have several gears of signs with which 
to reach people — people with slow-speed attention for instance, 
those with neutral attention, and those with high-speed atten- 
tion. 

269 



270 WE 

I would have this sign first: 

Private ! 

If anybody came in beyond the first part of the curve in the 
drive after seeing this sign they would face this one: 

PLEASE DO NOT TRESPASS 

And then, if they still went around the next curve, they would 
see: 

ANY PERSON TRESPASSING ON THIS PROPERTY WILL 
BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW 

Next curve : 

BEWARE OF THE DOG! 
Next: 

BEWARE OF THE LION! 

I thought that this was rather good at first — at once 
considerate of people's various feelings, discriminating and 
polite. 

Then I began to think about it more. Why bother, after all.^ 
The first sign is the best and most practical — I appeal to any 
reader. When you say ''Private' at the end of your drive and 
people know who you are, and how kindly, even humbly per- 
haps, you are asking them to let you keep an engagement with 
yourself awhile, and when they know you have written a book 
standing up for Crowds, and that of course all you really mean 
is that you want to be alone to work for them or think about 
them or eat a minute or take a nap, they accept the sign, take 
it over as their sign, as if they had written it for you themselves. 
They turn away glad to do you a favour, thanking you for let- 
ting them know in time. 

The whole problem of self-defense turns on having people 
know who one is, and what one is like, and how one feels. 

All there is to self-defense is being known and being ready to 
be known. 



WITH FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS 271 

This principle holds as true for a nation as for a man. 

But the argument for armament is that this would not work 
with criminal men or with nations. 

Possibly criminal nations — i. e., nations which propose to get 
what they want by force — are best managed the way all the 
other criminals are, or are coming to be, by appealing to their 
intelligence and self-respect and observation of human nature 
and their loyalty to the human race. 

The other day in Sing Sing, for the first time since the use 
of the honour system, a prisoner who had been given unusual 
liberties took advantage of them, broke his vow to his fellow- 
prisoners and to the warden, and escaped. The prisoners held 
a kind of Hague convention and passed resolutions of shame and 
sorrow and condemnation. It is the warden's character in 
Sing Sing prison that throws up walls all around it — daily 
amazing walls not made with hands, all around, implacable, 
invisible walls of the voluntary wills of men. 

The practical way to discipline another man, however bad 
he seems to be, is to be known by him stoutly, respected and 
flagrantly trusted by him, until before he knows it, with a kind 
of soft astonishment he sets himself to disciplining himself. 

And what is true of a man is true of a nation. 

The people of the world appeal to-day from the Lusitania- 
side of Germany and the Belgium-side of Germany to the best 
in the German nation. We know at heart that this is the way 
the whole muddle is finally going to be solved, of course, by ap- 
pealing to the best in the German nation and by getting Ger- 
many to discipline herself. We know that this is what Germany 
(and each other nation, too, for its share) is going eventually to 
do, and the more nearly we can come to taking this for granted 
and saving a place in our hearts and minds even while we fight 
her — for the Germany that will do this, the Germany that shall 
come to her senses herself and shall appeal to ours — the better 
and the more quickly will the trouble be over. England and 
France are not using force with Germany to-day. They are 



272 WE 

using force with the crazed people who are in control of the 
people of Germany. 



And even crazed people are better handled now by mind 
power than by force. There are seven hundred crazed people 
up on a hill not far from my house. Force makes them crazier. 
As it is force and fear of force that start the craziness, violence 
is practically going by in managing crazed people. It is going 
by in managing crazed nations next. We have merely not ar- 
ranged statesmen and diplomats as yet apparently who have the 
genius for it and put them in places of power to do it. 

There is nothing so very wonderful about this power. Any 
ordinary man who believes in this power as a matter of course 
can operate it, and the less fine moral flurrying he makes about 
doing it, and the more quietly he takes it for granted, the better 
he does it. 

Henry Ford, standing in the marble lobby of the Hotel Bel- 
mont the other night, was asked by a reporter to explain his idea 
of employing ex-convicts in his factory. After being prodded 
awhile he said the plan of giving employment to ex-convicts 
was so simple that there was nothing in it to talk about. 

*'I can't see what there is to explain," he said, very quietly. 
"You just put them to work, that's all." 

"Do you conceal the ex-prisoners' identities, Mr. Ford?" 

"Why, certainly not. Why should that be done? " 

And then he went on to say that the men working side by side 
with the ex-convicts treated them as men treat men. 

"Everybody will stick to a man who wants to work," he 
said. 

There was a pause while Mr. Ford left the reporters search- 
ing for another question to put to him. It was : 

"Would you take ex-convicts, put them in a row and pick 
out the best of them, rejecting the others? Would you examine 
their characters?" 



WITH FELLOW HUIVIAN BEINGS 273 

"No! Take 'em all," was the laconic reply. 

"They usually make good? " 

"They have to. All they want is the chance." 

"I suppose you'd try them out, and put them through your 
clearing-house until they saw where they fitted.'^" 

"Yes." 

Nothing in this world arouses or holds a man's attention or a 
nation's attention like being believed in. The best, most 
arresting and permanent way to get a man's attention is to set 
a very shrewd man (a man he knows is shrewder than he is) to 
believing in him before his eyes more than he believes in him- 
self. This man will almost invariably turn out to be a man who 
has the deeper belief that takes for granted, that does not seem to 
notice, that merely does some little thing or keeps from saying 
some little thing which reveals that his big belief (which has for- 
gotten to feel it is a big belief) is there. 

Henry Ford dares to disarm with his convicts. And they, of 
course, dare to disarm with him. 

In this way, I believe — and on this principle — in due time, 
America will make it as hard for criminal nations to fight 
America as Henry Ford makes it for convicts to fight Henry 
Ford. The convicts let themselves be helpless in Henry Ford's 
hands. 

Our enemies will be helpless. They will gratefully and hand- 
somely make themselves be helpless before our eyes. 

And as the Chinese when they meet others shake hands with 
themselves, so will our enemies be seen everywhere faithfully, 
hopefully and in our honour and in a great light, jumping up and 
down with joy before us, before everybody, jumping on them- 
selves and keeping themselves jumped on, day and night in our 
behalf. 

This lets a nation off of course very easily and cheaply. 

This is the only thorough and satisfactory way to fight that 
has ever been thought of. 



274 WE 

Self-defense for a man is the search for self-expression. 

Self-defense for a nation is the search for self-expression. 

The self-expression America will have to try for would have as 
the main drift of it, or undertone of it, something to this effect: 

Nobody shall fight with us ! Let them try ! We are too eager 
to get what we want. We will not give up to people who want to 
fight us. We want their love and their respect and our way all 
at the same time, and we propose to make our way so right and 
so fair, God helping us, that they can afford to want us and our 
way together. We have proposed to find a way to keep people 
and to keep things and have our way thrown in (if we can) be- 
sides. It is not merely our own way we want to get in America. 
We want our own way of getting our own way. 

Our getting them to understand that this is what is back of 
our not fighting, our getting them to respect and cooperate 
with our not fighting, is a matter of national advertising. We 
will pick out words and actions that will prove it to them that 
they are wrong about us. And then when they find that they 
have got us wrong, we will be in a position to suggest that as 
they have got us wrong, a fundamental part of the issue, they 
"iiay possibly have got some of our ideas, and some of the things 
we want to get from them, wrong, too. 

Then will come America's chance. 

And our chance will be their chance. 

The problem of peace, of peace without compromise, of peace 
without giving up an item of essentials, of peace with joy, of 
peace without threatening, without regretting and without de- 
spair, is the problem both in a nation and a man of asserting 
and attaining individual self-expression. 



HOW CAN A NATION GET WHAT IT WANTS? 

Looking at it from a world point of view and as a matter of 
ordinary plain sensible planet-housekeeping, it would be highly 
desirable to have Germany step in presently and give Con- 
stantinople the first real spring house-cleaning it has had in two 
thousand years. No one could begin to do in behalf of the rest 
of Europe as well as Germany the hard, capable rough work of 
setting Turkey, Armenia and the Balkans to rights, and of keep- 
ing them from fighting with each other long enough to live, and 
of keeping them in behalf of all nations where they can no longer 
throw around matches in the powder house of the world. 

And nothing would suit Germany better than to do this. 

Her heart aches with efficiency as she looks around Budapest, 
Sofia and Constantinople. 

Why is it that all the nations who want Turkey and the Bal- 
kans attended to are not asking Germany to-day with one accord 
to do it? 

They believe that Germany, if she were given control of Con- 
stantinople and the route to the East, would not make them the 
highway or great open street of all nations, and they believe 
that instead of governing them in the interests of the freedom 
and power and convenience of all people, she would govern them 
for her own. 

Germany's problem of getting control of Constantinople 
is an advertising problem — a problem of making other nations 
believe in her and trust her. 

How can Germany most quickly do this? 

Partly by words, partly by actions. First: By listening to 

275 



276 WE 

other nations and to what they think of her and of the way she 
treats the rights and hberties of others. Second: By reaching 
her hand over into all the nations and undermining and dis- 
proving before our eyes the accusations we make against her. 

Germany in her present dilemma and peril has a more press- 
ing need of experts in advertising than she has of soldiers. 

A nation which overrides and which has overridden and which 
seems to other nations (however unjustly) to have taken up 
with overriding as a kind of national religion has a plain expert 
feat of publicity engineering before it. Germany must prove to 
all nations that she is not an overriding nation by becoming 
before our eyes a winning nation — a nation that gets things out 
of people by presenting facts, ideas, actions and convictions to 
people of other nations which make people believe them, want 
to believe them and hand their belief on to others. 

The moment Germany begins to think of our modern, inter- 
national machine-world as it really is and the moment she 
reckons with the grim unyielding team-work genius of the people 
of a machine age and substitutes advertising for fighting, the 
moment she organizes and substitutes efficiency in understanding 
and being understood for efficiency without being understood at 
all, her whole tone and gait before the world will change. All 
the things she is saying now and doing and justifying and defy- 
ing now will be turned around and she will present a new face and 
speak in a new tone to a world. 

Germany has already shown her own latent national recog- 
nition of the explosive and relentless power of advertising in 
modern life. 

With what magnificent and unflinching faith in herself and 
in the integrity of her own workmen, in the moral sincerity of 
her people and her common shops and factories, has Germany 
already flung that stupendous challenge around the world 
of those little three terrifying words MADE IN GERMANY. 
For years she has posted on every tiny thing which she has 
made, and which she has sent boasting and singing into the 



HOW A NATION GETS WHAT IT WANTS 277 

homes of a thousand nations, this Uttle penetrating innumerable 
advertisement. The soHdity, the thoroughness, the penetrating, 
grim, faithful, sterling quality of the German national character 
have been innumerably, ceaselessly dramatized in aniline 
dyes and in dolls, in kitchens and nurseries, and acted out in the 
daily life of every man, woman and baby on the globe. 

Germany will never be a courtly and insinuating nation, but 
she can be so sublimely serviceable, so single-hearted, big- 
spirited, bluff and honest with us all in doing the things she does 
and in saying the things she says in behalf of a world, that we will 
be compelled to acknowledge her. We will first dislike, then 
believe, then defer to her — to the bluff and honest nation. We 
will all flock together to get her what she wants. But Germany 
must ask us to first. As long as she has the spirit of helping 
herself, the world will see to it that no one else helps her and 
that she is kept crowded into a third-rate power, lonely, hated, 
enraged, helpless and unhelped. 

I have tried to illustrate what advertising could do to give 
Germany a chance to defend her rights and to get what she 
wants in the world because many of my readers would rather 
see Germany try it first. 

Then we would. 

It is natural to us all perhaps to be a little less nervous with 
the truth when we see it being applied to other people. We 
relax and realize a little more freely. 

Then, being honest, we move it over a little slowly to ourselves 
afterward. 

I do not mind people coming to my truth with me the longer 
ivay around by way of Germany if they like. 



VI 
HOW CAN A NATION BE NAIVE WITH A WORLD? 

The general idea of being a soldier is that the less human you 
are, and the less human you act and look, the more people will be 
afraid to fight you. 

I think it is just the other way. 

The way to make people afraid to fight you is to be human and 
lovable. 

Of course there are details to be considered. 

The details are technical and consist in finding out the par- 
ticular revealing words and actions, revealing one's self as one 
really is, so that the more human and lovable (i. e.,full of love for 
others) a man really is, the more people will be afraid to fight 
him. 

A nation's defense is its genius for self -revelation, its power for 
being able to afford to be naive with a world. 

If a nation once has the serenity and strength to dare to live 
(as all democracies are supposed to do) with its spiritual doors 
open, there is not likely to prove to be any magic or miracle 
necessary in successfully using national exposure as a means of 
national self-defense. It is a matter of seeing the main points in 
the nation to be revealed, and then item by item and in order one 
after the other, on the block-signal system, driving through the 
actions and swinging up the signals and picking out the words 
that reveal them. 

This calls, of course, for experts and professional specialists. It 
requires of a nation that it shall pick out and employ men of re- 
vealing and interpreting genius with the same deliberate recog- 
nition of their function as a great profession of modern national 

^78 



HOW CAN A NATION BE NAIVE? 279 

defense, with the same deUberateness and the same expense that 
it is now devoting to a stupendously inefficient and incredibly 
bygone profession like being a general or admiral. 

The things that our nation wants to understand and have 
understood in dealing with other nations, are things that cannot 
be expressed for us by generals and admirals, by experts in im- 
pressing people with how frightful we are or how frightful we can 
be when we try, by murder-students or by men who seriously and 
professionally believe that nations should defend themselves by 
hurling cemeteries at each other, by battering each other with 
dead men. 

All one has to do is to think how it comes out when they suc- 
' ceed. And suppose after all that they do succeed, suppose these 
incredibly expensive experts do precisely the one narrow, mean, 
speechlessly sorrowful, empty thing they know how to do, and 
suppose that with their leadership we do finally succeed and do 
fill the other nations' cemeteries more than they fill ours? 

It cannot be said that these men will have expressed us and re- 
vealed us in doing this. They will have caricatured us to the 
people of the other nations in mounds of dead men. Every hill- 
side of graves will be a lie about us for a hundred years. 

As a matter of fact, filling their cemeteries is sadder to us, 
more dreary, guilty, more unmanning to us, than having them 
fill ours. If they fill ours it is their responsibility. When we 
have filled theirs we have no escape. We may still take some 
comfort in hating them after we have filled theirs. But why do 
we hate them? Because they have made us hate ourselves, 
have made us do things which make it daily, hourly, a hateful 
task to us to live and to have to live, to have to eat, drink, sleep, 
get up in the morning once more with ourselves! 



VII 
TWO AMERICAS AND ONE MR. ROOSEVELT 

But of course if a nation is going to depend upon getting at- 
tention, upon advertising itself to other nations, and upon ex- 
posing itself as a means of self-defense, it must first get its own 
attention very seriously to itself, and to what it is exposing. 

In America we face the fact that if America is to advertise it- 
self successfully, to Germany for instance, by using a policy of 
simple exposure to-morrow morning, it would end in a muddle. 
If all the men who are living in Germany could see all the men 
who are living in America, and see us all precisely as we are, they 
would want to start to-morrow morning to sort people over in 
America, divide us off, and then fight half of us, or a quarter or a 
third of us. 

There are two Americas. Germany looks at my America 
and feels one way, and it looks at Colonel Roosevelt's and feels 
another. 

So the question of self-defense for America narrows down at 
last to the question of getting Americans to line up to the 
America they want, look everything over in the next few months, 
and decide once for all which America they want to belong to — 
Colonel Roosevelt's or mine. 



«80 



VIII 
JACK JOHNSON AND MR. ROOSEVELT 

I am linking in this way the name of Jack Johnson and Mr. 
Roosevelt not as fighters but as philosophers. They have come 
to the same spiritual insight with regard to a man's making him- 
self plain to other people, and expressing his ideas. In the last 
resort, they both believe naively and solemnly in the beautiful, 
essential, fundamental fistiness of Thought. 

Standing carefully and looking at a thought or finding a word 
for it, and keeping one's hands folded quietly or in one's pocket 
while one uses the word, does not appeal to Jack Johnson and 
Mr. Roosevelt as forceful. 

Mr. Roosevelt thinks he appreciates the force of thought, 
but what Mr. Roosevelt thinks is less accurate about Mr. 
Roosevelt than what he does about what he thinks. 

In what he does, Mr. Roosevelt acts as if he did not believe in 
Thought. Mr. Roosevelt would not rely on defending a nation 
with a look. Mr. Roosevelt is always by temperament a little 
puzzled and scared when he thinks of the Quakers and their ways. 

A Quaker has always been safe, Mr. Roosevelt has to admit, 
with the wildest, most superstitious and most uninformed tribes 
of Indians. 

A woman who is going about among the loneliest mountain 
tribes, who goes obviously , plainly , or almost loudly unprotected, 
is as safe as a baby in its cradle. 

A Quaker seems to Mr. Roosevelt to be without adequate pro- 
vision for self-defense. To me, a Quaker has provided himself 
with the most difficult, elaborate, long-prepared self-defense any 
man can have. 

281 



282 WE 

All a man has to do is to take one single look at a Quaker's face 
to feel the hold-up he has, and to be kept instantly from wanting 
to fight him. This is the most thorough whipping any man could 
hope to get. Also the most agreeable, conclusive and per- 
manent. 

What makes people's faces peaceful is a long, elaborate, 
accumulated preparation of their inner works of self-de- 
fense. 

It takes all their lives, the ideas, motives, and feelings they 
have kept crossing and recrossing their faces, growing into them 
and blooming out of them for seventy years. 

In x\merica we will not fasten on armour, we will grow it, sleep 
with it, laugh cry love and grow rich with it. 

Carrying a gun makes a man or a nation a target. 

All that is necessary is to be glaringly peaceful, stand out with 
as fine, convincing, as absolutely unmistakable a plainness with- 
out means of protection, as other people stand out with it, and 
everybody, including the enemy, will protect us. 

The real truth about Mr. Roosevelt and manj^ others who 
assume to be our modern spiritual leaders to-day is that they 
have not the clear-headedness, the courage, the spiritual gusto 
and thoroughness of nature to be unarmed with this terrific 
sweeping and unmistakable plainness. 

Some years ago the Finnish people in Helsingfors, the capital 
of Finland, all came quietly one day, the children and old 
men, fathers and mothers, and stood in a great, silent, unarmed 
army of defencelessness in the Common, before the Russian army 
drawn up to attack them. The brave Russian soldiers were so 
afraid of them, so stricken in spirit and humbled before them, be- 
fore this sublime silent broadside of their fearlessness as they 
stood up to be shot, that not a soldier would shoot. And every 
soldier knew and every officer knew that the first oflficer that 
ordered the soldiers to shoot would be turned on and shot him- 
self. Finally two men went out from each side with white flags. 
In that mighty battle everything was granted to the people. 



JACK JOHNSON AND MR. ROOSEVELT 283 

Brave men and true fighters In the Russian army would 
rather stand up and be shot, or rather shoot one another, than 
to aim and shoot at men who would not shoot them and who 
dare to stand up to be shot. 

The Finnish people knew this. They had the courage to 
know this. They used this courage as their weapon. 

If Finland at about this time had been thinking up or trying 
to think up a splendid and gracious national tribute to the 
bravery of the Russian soldiers, a tribute that every Russian 
soldier w^ould rather die than not respond to, it could not have 
done better than to have the whole city of Helsingfors go out 
to the army, the little children from out of the schools, the 
women from out of the kitchens and the churches and the men 
from out of the shops, and all stand together there and bare 
their breasts to be shot. 

If ever a nation had a face and if ever a nation's face shone 
and defended a city by a look, it was ten years ago, one day, 
when the city of Helsingfors stood up to be shot. 

All the United States would have to do to defend itself with 
one cent's worth of armament as well as it is now defending 
itself with a hundred million dollars' worth would be to make its 
disarmament as loud and unmistakable, as fearful in its plain- 
ness, as its dreadnoughts are now. One big, simple, heroic 
monosyllable of peace that no nation can ever possibly hope to 
misunderstand will be all that is necessary. 

As a means of self-defense, standing with one hand held out 
to shake hands and the other on a pistol in one's hip pocket, is 
not quite bright. Real defenselessness is courageous and con- 
clusive. It makes the enemy afraid. 

All our trouble, and the trouble of all the other nations with 
regard to war, is that we have not the courage to be uncom- 
promising. Our nation is to-day still trying pathetically to 
compromise. It is because it goes about among the nations 
like all the others with its left hand held out to shake hands and 
its right hand on its hip pocket that it is in danger. 



IX 
HIP-POCKET PEACE 

As long as we think we have to fight, or as long as we have a 
Government that represents us as acting as if we thought we 
had to fight, we are cowards. We are not cowards individually — 
we still go about unafraid and unarmed in the streets — but our 
Government which we consent to let represent us has all one 
side paralyzed. Its whole right side (from the hip pocket down 
and up) is paralyzed with fear. 

It would be an unthinkable thing for America in the moment 
when eleven nations are all fighting against fighting, for us in 
sight of a whole world wishing it had our chance to be fearless 
without fighting to begin to fight, to slump back into being 
afraid not to be ready to fight. 

Of course it is generally admitted that the less broadly the 
spiritual has to be materialized by a people in order to get the 
attention of others, the higher they rank in civilization, but I 
am not recommending this more intangible way of fighting as a 
matter of national pride. I am merely considering what is 
practical. A man's fist is his broadest, most lumbering ma- 
terialization, and it cannot in the nature of things hope to be as 
economical, as convenient, as light handy or efficient a form of 
materializing an idea as a still look in the eye. It is because 
the eye in a nation or in a man is light handy and powerful, 
that I am making this stand for it. It is easier and more prac- 
tical and spiritual for a dog to express his idea of self-defense 
with his bark than his bite, but bis sense of smell is a dog's most 
powerful weapon in protecting himself from danger. It is the 

284 



HIP-POCKET PEACE 285 

most subtle and spiritual strength he has, and therefore the most 
flexible convenient and practical. 

In the same way it seems reasonable to hold that it is a man's 
five senses that were given to him to defend himself with and 
not his muscles. The more refined the sense, the more eco- 
nomical light convenient and effortless it is, the more powerful 
it is. 

I do not see why this principle does not hold as good in de- 
fending a nation as a man. If the eyes of this nation have 
half as much spent on them as we spend on a huge logy navy or 
army, on dreadnoughts and muscles, no one would dare touch 
us. A face for this nation, a face that shall make nations love 
or fear us, that shall sway a world as it is swayed itself, by seeing 
and by being seen, shall yet be our national defense. 

How can America fight with its Face? As Finland showed 
its Face on the Common at Helsingfors and drove back the 
enemy by looking and by being looked at, how can a vast nation 
like America have a Face and defend itself with its Face? I am 
dealing with this in detail in later chapters. 

In the meantime I make the claim for America that American 
self-defense is to be by self -revelation, by advertising partly by 
our artists and national interpreters, and partly by men of 
action, by the revelation in action and in business dealings of the 
keen, farsighted, self-contained, attractive, terrific, imperious, 
unconquerable peacefulness of the American character. 

We will at least try to live up to the ideal of a big dog with 
a little one, or we will be like a big shrewd bear. If people 
try to attack us and fight with us, they will get a big, peaceful, 
quieting hug — banks and markets and inventions and Ford cars. 
We will prevent war not by threatening violence. We will hug 
nations with services they cannot give up, with wealth for them, 
for us, with vision for them, for us, with our overwhelming sense 
of identity, with our gusto and skill in saying We, with a 
surroundingness, a world-patriotism no nation can look us in the 
face, or any other nation in the face, and withstand. 



286 WE 

We will base our defense on our shrewdly critical, self-search- 
ing, grounded faith in our own characters, in the ability of these 
characters to make themselves understood to others, in our 
keenly observant, well-grounded, expert faith in the ability of 
others to understand. 

Here are the two ways : self-defense by self-expression or ad- 
vertising; and self-defense by threat and armament — Mr. Roose- 
velt's way and mine. 

America cannot use them both. 

America cannot love and trust and be loved and trusted with 
its hand on its hip pocket. Unless we can make people believe 
our peace is not a mere Sunday-schoql peace, we will be shot. 
We must not say "Come to Jesus" to the other nations — with 
our hands on our hip pockets. Our hour has come. America 
is about to choose, and let the whole world watch us choose, 
between Mr. Roosevelt's way and mine. 



X 

EVERYBODY STEP THIS WAY 

I am not in favour of having America defend herself as Fin- 
land did, by a kind of heroic and tragically helpless act of peace, 
by standing up to be shot with a magnificent unflinching faith 
in the manhood of her enemies. But if the little nation of Fin- 
land by showing its Face to a few soldiers on a Common could 
defend herself as she did, I wonder what America could do 
by revealing her Face to a world — by advertising and drama- 
tizing her soul as she really is, by a stupendous campaign of 
words and actions, unveiling the countenance and the will of her 
people, setting up her national self-expression among the peo- 
ples of the earth. 

I am not making a stand against preparedness. I am as much 
afraid of unpreparedness as Mr. Roosevelt. 

I merely would substitute for Mr. Roosevelt's army and 
navy a tremendous advertising campaign, in the hands of 
geniuses and experts, which will make all peoples know 
what we are like, what our peacefulness is like, and what 
our peacefulness is doing and is able to do for them and for 
us. 

If every man in every nation knew that America is a country 
where all the people have a habit of getting what they want at 
home without fighting, they would not have to be afraid of us 
or get ready to fight us. 

Our national self-defense is to be made up of an actual 
every-day contagious reproductive peace which flows over from 
us into other nations. 

A preachified peace would not work, I admit. 

^87 



288 WE 

The only peace America has really tried or really stood for as 
yet is a preachified peace. 

It is because the two things that Mr. Roosevelt can do best 
are preaching and fighting that he takes the vociferous stand 
he does for armament. 

Preaching always leads to fighting. If all one can do to a 
man is to tell him what he ought to do, if one is not shrewd 
enough to express it, to get him to see it so that he wants to do 
it, one has to be ready to fight him as a matter of course. 

Anybody would know from the way Mr. Roosevelt always 
pounds on a table when he talks, the way he bears on and rolls 
people under with his voice, the way he sets his teeth in a sub- 
ject and shakes it, that he would be driven to the idea of a large 
armament for national defense. All an armament could pos- 
sibly be for in this country would be as a substitute for our 
power to express ourselves. 

Not being able to express ourselves leads to preach- 
ing. Preaching leads to pounding, and pounding leads to 
fighting. 

There are a great many people like Mr„ Roosevelt. 

I more than agree with Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Gardner 
that this nation if it cannot get ready to express itself must 
get ready to fight. And I believe that the best and most ar- 
resting, capable and conclusive way for this nation to express 
itself to all other nations at once (speaking from the point 
of view of advertising and of touching the imagination of na- 
tions) is for us to throw down our arms, give up the conven- 
tional act of self-defense and substitute for an act of self- 
defense an act of self -revelation. The secret of advertising 
is doing the thing that will arrest and hold attention. The con- 
ventional act of self-defense will not attract any attention. 
Everybody is doing it. We shall be one in a row. Nobody will 
notice us or notice our character one way or the other. We 
will have made every possible arrangement not to stand out. 
It would be better to substitute national plate-glass windows 



EVERYBODY STEP THIS WAY 289 

for fortresses and searchlights for guns and say to our enemies : 
"Look at us! Look us in the eyes ! " Then they will look. 

If we are not ready to say to our enemies, "Look at us!" If 
what they saw when they looked would make them want to 
fight us, then we will spend an immense appropriation at home 
on getting ready to be looked at. We will present to the world a 
country which has already achieved such a difficult, incredible, 
stupendous peace with itself (between capital and labour, i. e., 
between everybody in the country and everybody else in the 
countr^O that a little matter like not fighting another nation 
would not seem complicated to it. International peace is a by- 
product of peace at home. National defense consists in fronting 
the world with ninety million people who get everything they 
want to get by peace, whose only skill and shrewdness is known 
to be in getting things by peace, who like all artists, like all ex- 
pressive or convincing people, have succeeded in expressing 
themselves, their ideas, in their own personalities and in their 
own lives. 

I do not want to be personal, but I believe that the reason 
Mr. Roosevelt feels as he does about armament is that he has 
been driven to it. He has tried to express himself all his life, 
and because he cannot do it, he thinks no one can. He does 
not really believe in expression very much. And now because 
he cannot express an idea very well except by office or action 
himself, and because he has to get very red in the face and 
pound on the table himself to express an idea, he thinks the 
nation should. 

There are others of us who have kept out of politics (which 
is largely a preaching profession at best) and who have found 
some art-form for revealing ourselves, our own business, for in- 
stance, whatever it may be, who have had a contrary experience 
in making our intentions, desires and feelings plain to others. 

I have said that I like to think for one, down underneath of 
course, that this nation can be so expressed in a book or in a 
series of books, that all nations will know us and dread to fight 



290 WE 

us. I like still more to think of the way our factories, our mil- 
lions of peaceful workmen and our countless tons of peace-made 
goods which are filling the world with a sense of what American 
character and American ideas are like, will do to express us. 

On the other hand, in a sudden exigency and for the time 
being I do not want to deny that Mr. Roosevelt's way of ex- 
pressing himself is quicker than mine. There are various gifts 
and temperaments in the American nation, and it seems to me 
the fair way to put it would be something like this. If Mr. 
Roosevelt will say he does not want to try to coop this nation 
up in his temperament, I am free to say that I don't want to 
coop up ninety million people in mine. 

And I see only one way open to us of having the same nation 
in a great crisis of national defense express its Roosevelts and 
its Henry Fords together to a world. 

It is a way at which I have hinted before. 

The best way for this nation to defend itself or express itself 
effectively to all other nations is by having everybody in it ex- 
press himself in the way that is most natural to him. 

If Mr. Gardner and Mr. Roosevelt have a natural gift for 
preaching peace with a big stick, the United States ought to 
supply them with a big stick and let them preach with it. 

If Mr. Ford and others have a natural gift for going about 
with nothing in their hands, and a knack for walking softly and 
speaking low in getting what they want noticed, the United 
States ought to supply to them as good a chance to walk softly 
and to speak low, as it supplies to Mr. Roosevelt to threat and 
thunder. 

I do not say of Mr. Roosevelt as he would say of me that he 
is not a patriot. Even a pacifist is a patriot. All these people 
about us who disagree with us will have to be allowed to have 
licenses as patriots and be allowed to help defend the country. 
We need everybody. I need Colonel Roosevelt and he needs me. 

The country can only hope to defend itself with the people that 
it has got. We might imagine better, more convenient, or less 



EVERYBODY STEP THIS WAY 291 

lopsided ones, but if we are all honest and if we will all act pre- 
cisely as we are, the nation is going to reveal itself and make it- 
self known and understood. 

The question seems to be: "How can a nation which is in 
this mixed-up state of mind, and which wants to be fair to every- 
body, and which honestly wants to carry a big stick and a soft 
voice, and which wants to express its temperament with a big 
stick and a soft voice in the same breath, do it?" 

By combined self-disarmament and armament for world-de- 
fense. 

Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Gardner with their natural gifts of be- 
ing scared on time and of threatening and shooting, iVmerica will 
employ to defend the whole world. Mr. Ford and Mr. Oswald 
Villard and Mr. Wilson and Jane Addams, and the people who 
really get things done by expressing their good intentions and 
characters in words and action so that people believe them, 
America will employ to announce to all nations that she throws 
down her arms and forever declines to fight for herself, that 
America believes in peace and believes in getting all she wants to 
get for herself and in keeping all she wants to keep for herself, 
through peace, through an imperious, indomitable, unevadablc 
peace. 

In this way America and everybody in it will be honest and 
everybody will be employed in expressing his nation in his own 
way. 

Gradually, of course, we hope (even Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. 
Gardner hope it, probably), that Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Gardner 
year by year will be less and less necessary and yearly less relied 
on, and Mr. Ford's way will slowly, courteously crowd their way 
off the stage of the world. 

Mr. Roosevelt is a peace man. He has always said he was. 
He merely does not want to be peaceful yet. It would be very 
bad for the nation if a man just like Mr. Roosevelt were allowed 
to go about being peaceful. He would make rather dangerous 
work of it. We can only give him the chance to do the best he 



292 WE 

can. Only people should be allowed to be peace people to the 
full limit who can express themselves. The rest — at least until 
they gradually dare not to— must fight, or what is spiritually the 
same thing, be ready to fight. There are still, after the war is 
over, parts of the world and corner-nations on earth where this 
spirit still lives, and in dealing with corner-nations and very rude 
people very suddenly and firmly, and with other people who are 
as scared and suspicious as they are, it is to be admitted that Mr. 
Roosevelt and Mr. Gardner and their way would be very useful 
and would work better for a little while than the way of the rest 
of us would. 

While we would not choose Mr. Roosevelt just now to express 
our feelings in defense of ourselves to other nations with our 
army and navy, any emotions and powers we have of fighting in 
behalf of a world we will be proud to have him express for us. 

On the other hand, when it comes to having Mr. Roosevelt 
slashing around with an army and navy defending us, it seems to 
us it would be very dangerous for us. We cannot afford it. 

What is more, it does not represent us or represent the way we 
feel. We do not feel like defending ourselves, like declaring to 
other nations how we distrust them and have to. It is not true. 

We demand from Mr. Roosevelt, if we let him have his big 
army and navy to play with, to express the will of all nations and 
to defend all nations, that he shall stand one side and shall let us 
throw down our arms and push forward our factories to defend 
ourselves. 

World defense from Roosevelt and Hobson. 

National defense from Henry Ford, Luther Burbank, Theo- 
dore N. Vail, a reformed Steel Trust, a reformed Standard Oil, 
from fleets of corporations businesslike enough to have souls, 
from newspapers that open up the hearts of the people, and from 
the first authors in the next generation we shall find writing real 
American literature and expressing real American character, re- 
vealing to us and to all nations the spiritual forces of American 
life. 



XI 

THE PLANET LOCKUP 

While I am in favour of having Colonel Roosevelt's gift for 
hunting lions (for museums only) utilized by this country, and 
while I want to see every whit of the lion-hunting temperament 
the country has still surviving in it duly recognized and duly 
used as a part of our national preparedness, I do not like to take 
this stand without making very plain under just what conditions 
I believe the use of force is justified. 

I believe in the force of the sword of the spirit as much as any 
one, and I believe the spirit should have a sword of one sort or 
another. It is the force of the sword without the spirit that I 
am dealing with in this chapter. 

Speaking theoretically, God alone has a right to use force, be- 
cause He always uses it to express intimately and accurately (as 
in a lily or in a thunderstorm, a sunrise or a winter night, or in a 
great man) His spirit as a God. Force is spirited and beautiful 
and is always an art-form to God. He leaves Himself free to use 
force, because, bemg a God, He automatically never makes a 
mistake with it. 

If He made mistakes with force or knew He was liable to make 
mistakes with it any minute (as a man does or as a nation does) , 
He would doubtless feel obliged to make some provisional ar- 
rangement with HimseK, have some understanding, by which He 
used it either very economically or very slowly. 

And as a matter of fact, strange and humble as it may seem, 
this is very much what He does. When one thinks how eco- 
nomical, procrastinating and slow God always is with a man 
(sometimes He only finishes up punishing him in several genera- 

293 



294 WE 

tions), when one considers how magnificently He waits for people 
almost holding back again and again the laws of Nature with one 
hand over a man — over a drunkard, over a rake — throwing him 
back on himself again and again, once more and still once more, 
and not letting his sins slay him still once more, it does seem as if 
the Emperor of Germany, who is trying to be such a close imita- 
tion, would have thought of it before this, would have realized 
that if God Himself, who never makes a mistake in using force, 
still feels obliged to use it so modestly, so economically, and with 
a kind of vast, roomy, easy, slpw, experimenting though tfulness, 
it might just possibly be suggestive to the German Government. 

If the German Government admits that it regularly makes 
mistakes, that it has in fact like other governments a regular 
habit of slipping into mistakes, all it can logically do is to be 
very economical and slow in using force that can only make the 
mistakes louder, more humiliating and dangerous. 

History is full of models. 

All a nation has to do to demolish itself is to use enough force 
to fossilize, statueize, immortalize enough mistakes, to use 
enough force to make unforgettable and unforgivable enough 
mistakes, and it slips back into the second or third row of na- 
tions. 

The fact that is standing in the foreground of the world every 
day while this war is going on, is that no one set of people this 
world has produced yet, is or can ever be, good or beautiful 
enough to use asphyxiating gases to convince or to improve the 
others. 

If God Himself merely has a right to use force because He auto- 
matically cannot make a mistake, and if God Himself in running 
four thousand years of the history of the human race has always 
been observed using force with a reckless economy, with a pain- 
ful slowness that could not but seem scandalous to a German; 
oflScer, there is but one conclusion possible to all thinking men 
to-day, to all men not yet crazed by patriotism, and not yet un- 
manned by self-defense, and that is that the only right on the 



THE PLANET LOCKUP 295 

earth to-day to use force is the right of the nearest approach to a 
God that the world affords. 

And what is the nearest approach to a quasi-infaUibihty, to a 
pro-tem-absolute, pro-tem-godhke Truth, that this httle ridicu- 
lous whirl and whirry of dust spinning vaguely through Space 
we live on, could hope to have? 

The only Voice that has the right to use force to back up its 
will with any nation, on this earth, is the Voice of all other 
nations. 

This star is going to be a democracy of nations. Any nation 
on it that uses force against any other nation shall be arrested by 
force by all the nations, imprisoned and shut in by itself, locked 
up as in a hole on the planet, thrust down into the hole of being 
with itself. There shall we keep it, keep it sick with its own 
sickness, small with its own smallness, fevered with its own 
brutality, until it is weary of itself, weary of saying I, i, i, i, i, to 
itself until it looks up and pays some attention to the rest of us, 
and asks us from down in the subcellar of its own patriotism what 
there is it can do to come up and say We with us once more 
and be allowed once more in the sunlight on the floor of the world 
where strong nations of the earth, like young children in the sun, 
run and play all together as one family, run and play with the 
seas, with the continents, with the sky and with the air and with 
the stars, on Our Little House. 

Every small boy has to be shut up in a closet once in so often. 
All the Boys are going to attend to it together now. For the first 
time in history one nation is not going to say to another nation : 
"Now, I am going to take you and shut you up and punish you." 
The first nation that begins talking in this tone to any nation 
will be taken hold of and shut up promptly by all of us. 

We will bang the door of a whole planet on it and let it sit and 
think. 

We are going to have the planet fitted up with a suitable 
planet-closet now in a few years. 

The peoples of this earth, made in five colours, living on seven 



296 WE 

seas, begotten in five zones, are about to form themselves at last 
— all these nice, growing, funny, cocksure, adolescent little 
nations — into a kind of George Junior Republic. We will keep 
each other straight, all of us together, when it comes each one's 
turn to be naughty. 

It will not need to be a very large closet and it will not be used 
much. The bare thought of the planet-closet will be enough. 
The bare thought of being in the closet will be enough. It will 
arouse other thoughts. And when one little wicked nation out 
of a hundred begins thinking, with all the other ninety-nine 
booking on and wishing it well and wishing it would hurry, and 
hating to lock it up to think, it will be good. 

It will remember how the last naughty nation looked ten years 
ago in just these circumstances, have its international sense of 
humour touched, have its international imagination piqued. It 
will not want to be locked up to be good. 

God alone has a right to use force. 

Next to God, humbly and in the name of God, a whole world 
alone has a right to use force. 

And the only right the whole world has to use force is to use 
force to keep force from being used by anybody except by a God 
or by a whole world. 



XII 
FRIGHTFULNESS AND THOUGHTFULNESS 

But when I bring forward the idea that a nation can better 
defend herself by advertising, that she can attract more attention 
by being human and expressing it than by being frightful and ex- 
pressing it, Mr. Roosevelt will remind me that Germany in the 
last year has received, by fighting, more notice than all nations 
put together in this world. 

But notice is all she has got. She has not got any attention. 
Anybod^^ in any nation with a little intelligent sympathy, with a 
little power of taking Germany's best point of view, with a grim, 
fighting desire for being fair to Germany and a desire to keep on 
fighting for being fair to her in the United States, has been 
turned back in defeat and sorrow. 

The attention that Germany had got through her artists, 
philosophers and poets, her great scientists, her mighty mer- 
chants covering the earth and her peaceful sailors steering a 
world about the seas, is not hers now. 

A great clutter and heap of rage is all that Germany has got 
— an overwhelming, unsurmountable, undying rage of shooting 
and not listening. 

Nobody is paying any attention to Germany, and nobody 
will, until she stops trying to impress people by her Belgiums 
and by her Lusitanias. 

Germany has been busy all the last sixteen months postponing 
any power she may have, or ever have, of getting the attention 
of other nations — five hundred years. 

The only people in Germany who will ever be able once more 
to get attention for Germany, i. e., to bring to pass a practical, 

297 



29S WE 

working, spiritual understanding of her by other nations, will 
be the Germans Colonel Roosevelt calls cowards, the Germans 
who are and were against the war, who have been momentarily 
betrayed and who will say that they have been betrayed by their 
experts in being scared on time, and scared first, into believing 
it could not have been helped. 

The constructive business men in Germany believed in adver- 
tising. So did the social democrats. People did not understand 
Germany, they claimed. "Let them be told," they said. "Let 
everybody wait and see what we are like and can do." 

But Germany's business men and democrats and masters of 
ideas and of modern weapons went under to her experts, her 
narrow specialists in force, to men who made a stupendous 
blunder in interpreting and estimating human nature and what 
would work with human nature in other nations. 

Germany has allowed herself to be taken over soul and body 
by the military man's glib, ordering mind, the soldier's short- 
sighted, blunt, flat, heavy, pile-driving, machine-minded idea 
of what are the real elements of power in her own people and 
other peoples. 

She got human nature wrong in Belgium. It was only a spe- 
cialist's view of human nature that supposed Belgium would not 
fight because it was little. The German military party, a 
group of specialists, would not have fought. So it thought 
Belgium would not. 

The Lusitania, too, was a soldier's highly specialized blunder, 
the shortness and narrowness of judgment, the failure to see the 
longer, wider consequences, viz., the dismayed admission wedged 
against their wills into the minds of peaceful men around a 
world that there was nothing to do with a nation that would do a 
thing like this, that would ring bells of joy over doing a thing 
like this, but to gather together over her, heap up a world against 
her, throw a world upon her and crush her. 



FRIGHTFULNESS AND THOUGHTFULNESS 299 

Germany was led by her soldiers into advertising with guns 
because she thought she could not help it. 

Probably America would have been led by her experts in guns 
into advertising in the same way, under the same conditions. 

What can America do and do now to avoid being trapped as 
Germany was into advertising her guns instead of advertising 
herself.^ 

If our nation is to defend herself by self -revelation, by a cam- 
paign of attracting the attention of other nations to what 
America is like and by studying and practising the art of making 
nations look, I wish to admit that I have not ready off-hand an 
advertisement for America to stop war with. I am not claim- 
ing for advertising that we can hope to make the twenty nations 
all busy and crazy with fighting now look very hard all at once. 
I am not counting on their having a beautiful, divine under- 
standing of us and of one another and plenty of sweetness and 
light (between murders) all at once. 

I grant to Colonel Roosevelt that if I am proposing a sub- 
stitute for immediate armament I must propose an especially 
prompt and efficient self-revelation with which to defend the 
nation at once. 

As an amateur researcher in the art of attracting attention and 
of advertising and of controlling the thoughts, motives and 
moods of others, I have seen the situation, the nation-advertising 
situation, as it stands at this crisis, as described in the next 
chapter. 



XIII 

THE ELEMENTS OF A GOOD NATIONAL ADVERTISE- 
MENT OF AMERICA 

As we look up from our daily work in the United States we 
find suddenly that twenty nations just across the water from us 
have apparently gone crazy. Expressed more precisel3% just 
what has happened to Germany and to France, Russia and 
Italy, is that in each of these nations people are all crazy about 
other people's being crazy. 

The first and most arresting and amazing thing one nation 
can do to attract, grip and wield the attention of twenty crazy 
nations is not to be crazy, too. 

This is just plain, ordinary, human common sense. 

Any man would find this way worked wonderfully with an- 
other crazy man, and a nation (with so many kinds of people all 
boiling up and down in it) would be still more arresting and 
commanding in dealing with craziness, in standing still and not 
being crazy, too. 

Most of us have already noticed that being self-contained 
and self-possessed is what always impresses and convinces people 
who are not self-possessed. We have all had our moments of 
not being self-possessed. We have worked the principle out 
by experience. It is always the self-possessed people we let 
possess us first when we are under the domination of anger or are 
being a little crazed. 

I think that if we can keep Colonel Roosevelt and Mr. Gard- 
ner in the background for a little and employ them in getting 
ready for world defense, this course of tremendous national 
self-possession, slowness, clearheadedness, will attract more at- 

300 



A GOOD NATIONAL ADVERTISEMENT 301 

tention, make nations look respect and listen to us more, hope 
for us and thank God for us more than anything else. This is 
the first step I would have America take in getting the atten- 
tion of twenty crazy nations. We will meet madness with in- 
explicable arresting self-possession, with an unfathomable, 
personal self-assertion — assertion of ourselves as we are. We 
will fight in our way and drive others if they want to fight with 
us to fight our way instead of fighting theirs. 

W^e will not be dictated to on our broad plains, our fresh val- 
leys, and our high mountains and across our mighty seas, by the 
ideas and habits of the older nations, nor will we meekly let 
them place in our hands strange weapons that we do not know, 
that do not belong in our world, and that are merely left over in 
theirs. We will assert our own souls. We will defend ourselves 
with things that we have and that we want to have, and with 
things we naturally make and want to make, instead of defend- 
ing ourselves with guns and shells, with things we do not 
have, things we do not want, and with men and kinds of men 
we will not beget and will not conceive in a clean fresh land — ■ 
strike-under-water sneakers, chlorine-gas heroes — men that 
go about stinking cities to death, aiming at a fort and a 
baby-carriage alike, at dreadnoughts and at women alike. 
The bombs and the mines, the thousands of ways and things and 
people in which just for the moment noble and beautiful civili- 
zations think or seem to think they are expressing themselves, 
shall not express us. 

The noble and beautiful civilizations are wrong in thinking 
they can express themselves or need to express themselves in 
this way. 

They all say they are themselves. 

There may be nations so placed either by circumstances or 
by their leaders that they may be obliged to think that the best 
way to fight war is with more of precisely the same kind of 
war. 

Our nation is not. It is only because there were so many 



302 WE 

Roosevelts in Germany and France and Russia and England 
that they were dragged into it. 

All that has happened to Mr. Roosevelt now and just lately 
as a peace advocate, happened to Emperor William as a peace 
advocate first. Emperor William has felt for forty years pre- 
cisely as Mr. Roosevelt does to-day. And what happened to 
Emperor William forty years ago is now happening to Ger- 
many and to all Europe, and now Mr. Roosevelt is letting it 
happen to him. 

But the United States will not — not for twenty Lusitanias. 

The United States will keep to the main point and hold 
to the motto: not a dollar a year for self-defense. 
Billions a month to defend a world. 

We would spend our first billion in engineering and on engi- 
neers and experts in attracting and focussing the attention and 
touching the imagination of all nations, in organizing the atten- 
tion of a world on how it can defend itself and on how it will 
let America proceed to defend it. 



The next principle of attracting the attention and touching 
the imagination of other peoples, which the nation can use to 
advantage after an act and word of self-possession will be an 
act of striking unexpected national individuality, an assertion 
6f our national temperament, of some real, honest, robust dif- 
ference between America and other nations, a difference which, 
partly by geography, climate and birth, and partly by our 
methods of education, by our struggles, privations and oppor- 
tunity, we have grown to have. 

If what we are specifically trying to do is to attract atten- 
tion in a distracted world and make distracted nations look, we 
must follow the principle of all good advertising and do the one 
thing of all others that among the nations as they are expressing 
themselves to-day will make America stand out as in raised white 
letters on this great, strange, new, black billboard of the world. 



A GOOD NATIONAL ADVERTISEMENT 303 

It is quite obvious, when twenty nations are all fighting each 
other with guns, with massive steel and concrete, and with 
clouds of chlorine gases, with boats sneaking under water, and 
with huge clumsy birds of murder preying about upon all 
the air, it is quite obvious that this nation has got to do some- 
thing at once and something very fearful-looking, awe-inspiring 
and blood-curdling, to be safe from being attacked and from 
having us all murdered in our beds. In fact, it is so obvious that 
about sixty nations have already hustled themselves together 
in big armaments and proceeded as quickly as they could to 
look terrible. 

But when a thing is so obvious that sixty nations have already 
thought of it, is it not also obvious that the best, surest and 
cheapest thing for a nation to do would be to think of something 
that sixty nations had not already thought of — something, in 
fact, so true, so simple and so original that in the nature of 
things possibly only one or two nations would be likely to think 
of it? 

It is because each one of these nations has thought of defend- 
ing itself in the same way, as a matter of course, that that same 
way is not working, and that none of them, as anybody can see at 
a glance (losing thousands of men a day), is really defended. 

It seems to me that President Hibben of Princeton, when he 
got up a little while ago as a member of the Mohonk Peace Con- 
ference and proposed the rapid and immediate training of all 
students and young men to bear arms, must have overlooked 
this principle of what makes a nation stand out. I do not deny 
that the natural humdrum thing for President Hibben to think 
of for the nation is to have the students of Princeton armed, and 
pile up ships and armies, bombs, murder-birds, death-fish, and 
gather them all fearfully up all around us and try to keep all our 
enemies scared the way everybody else does. • 

But that is just it. Everybody else does. So it does not work. 

And yet I more than agree with President Hibben that this is 
what we must do if we cannot think of anything, three thousand 



304 WE 

miles off over here by ourselves — that the other sixty nations 
tangled up together were not free to think of. 

I think we can think of something, and that we already have» 
and that we have merely to express it. I ask every man in 
America to face this question for himself. 

Do you not think we owe it to the other nations and that we 
owe it to ourselves, selected as we are out of all the clutter of the 
world to have our own way, placed as we are way off by our- 
selves on a vast three-thousand-mile fort between two lonely 
oceans, to have an individual, modern idea of our own, an idea 
that goes with our three thousand miles, to confront a world 
with, an idea that we shall stand out for like men, and express 
and back up like men until all the nations shall thank us for our 
idea, shall see it, have it proved to them, and shall come over 
to us at last and stand with us at last and take our idea for 
theirs.^ 

The disagreement I have with President Hibben and his idea 
of a thousand Princeton students armed with Presbyterianism 
and guns, and of a whole nation following suit, is that it is not 
only a humdrum idea but a hand-to-mouth idea of getting the at- 
tention of nations. 

If the next thing to do was all a nation had to think of when it 
did a thing, President Hibben would be right. 

But it is the next thing after the next thing America wants to 
think of when it decides on the next thing to do. 

When a nation with as much room as ours moves, it should see 
and move at least two ideas ahead. 

The problem of self-defense in this nation is to focus the at- 
tention now of this nation, and focus it quickly on its second idea 
ahead. 

It ought not to be difficult. 

With all Europe, with twenty nations across the sea all en- 
gaged day and night in spending fifty million dollars a day in 
pointing out any sensible nation's second idea ahead, we ought 
to be getting it by this time. 



A GOOD NATIONAL ADVERTISEMENT 305 

The present war between nations is supplying us by force, and 
before our eyes, with what our first idea is. 

What the nations are thinking, as they are beginning to think, 
is something hke this : 

First idea : Let each nation settle down on a policy, after this 
war, of arming itself against other nations. Then after this 
idea there will be some history. Self-defense for fifty years will 
be all any nation will do or be interested in doing or have time to 
do. It will be all money will be for in nations after this, to pre- 
pare the men in the nation to be prepared to fight, to stand with 
guns and look frightful and be ready to fight. 

Presently there will be very little money left. 

Second idea : The money that will be left will be spent on or- 
ganizing world attention and world defense instead of na- 
tional defense. 

America, to-day, to attract attention and to help, shall cut 
across to the second idea first, shall cut across to it now, shall cut 
across to it before any other nation does, and found the modern 
world. 

President Hibben broke out at the Mohonk Peace Conference 
as he did because he did not have and no one had proposed a 
definite substitute, a technical, practical substitute vision of how 
this country can defend itself by advertising and by advertising 
its temperament, its services and powers, by reasoning nations 
into friendliness, of how this nation will soon be in a position to 
oust nations out of hostility by lending them money, to bring 
them to terms by aiming huge mutual markets at them, by ex- 
changing ideas, inventions, arts and machines and parts of their 
religions. 

If President Hibben would look two ideas ahead for the nation 
and would see that this nation is in a position to defend itself by 
advertising itself, I believe he would soon agree with me that the 
most amazing, sensational, blood-curdling advertisement this 
nation could have of what it is really like, of how terrible and self- 
contained it is, would be to refuse to fight with arms, and then 



306 WE 

proceed to whip everybody in sight by having what we have and 
by being what we are, and standing and looking at them and 
folding our arms ! 

These are the first two methods of attracting attention which 
I would have America employ to defend herself and to get and 
hold the attention of crazy nations. First: she will conquer and 
get the attention of their craziness by not being crazy, too, by 
being absolutely and inexplicably self-possessed; second: she 
will get the attention of nations that are destroying themselves 
by all having the same monotonous idea and by all being exactly 
alike, by an original idea that will stupendously stand out: 
*' Billions for the defense of you all. Not a dollar for self- 
defense.'^ 

The third means America will use to attract attention and to 
authoritatively reveal herself will be her famous men. 



XIV 
THE USES OF FAMOUS MEN 

The uses of famous men in a country are not always quite ap- 
preciated at first by thoughtful people. Thoughtful people — at 
least those of us who like to think we are thoughtful — often feel a 
little suspicious and dubious in America about our famous men. 
There are so many of them that America does not really seem to 
need to have famous. "Who's Who" is nearly half of it wrong. 
What is it in a democracy like ours that makes crowds act as 
they do about famous men? 

I have only recently come to guess or rather to apply in my 
thought what lies behind this eager reckless and rather mean- 
mgless way people in America seize on a man, make him famous, 
plump him into fame almost in a day. We do not seem to care 
much about details, even about the little detail of who the man is 
or what he is like. We can be seen everywhere in America — vast 
crowds of us every day, moving ruthlessly along, scooping people 
up out of nonentity, out of little villages and making them 
famous whether or no, whether anybody sees why or not, or 
\rhether they want to be or not. 

It seems to be one of the little mannerisms and peculiarities of 
crowds. 

My explanation of this little peculiarity of crowds is that 
crowds want and insist on having famous men as advertisements 
of themselves. Crowds seem to be seized by some kind of 
unfathomable, elemental passion for compact self-revelation, 
self -consciousness, self-expression. By their own unknown, im- 
measurable hunger to exist, to express, they are driven into 
crystallizing themselves into famous men, into rolling them- 

307 



308 WE 

selves up in little samples, into taking all this huge, nebulous, im- 
potent everybodiness of theirs, and putting it up in a small shape 
where they can see it and gloat on it, and watch themselves 
exist. 

This nation already instinctively knows it can only be adver- 
tised, and can only attain its right and its power of self-expres- 
sion, through famous men, through typical men everybody 
knows. 

A famous man need not be so much w orth looking at for him- 
self. Many, and in fact most, of our famous men are men in whom 
crowds merely let themselves go. Famous men in this sense may 
be said to be a nation's luxuries, or orgies. We have an egregious 
longing in a great flat prairie of folks for famous men. We will 
have tills longing satisfied. Someone has to attend to it. And if 
no one attends to the famous-man supply in a country, people 
must expect to find themselves being drafted into being famous 
whether they fit the position or not. 

Their not fitting may even help. We do not care. We go on 
fondly and make them still more famous for not fitting it. 

Any one out of a thousand of us might have fallen into being 
a public character, a criminal, a governor, a film, a byword, a 
bishop, as well as the man who does and who is being steeped in 
fame for it. But a crowd is so happy in looking at any one thing 
together, at a dot, at a fly-speck on a wall, at a man on a steeple, 
that it does not mind. What is looked at in the man is his being 
looked at. He serves in a representative capacity as a peg to 
hang the wandering minds of a crowd on and pull its attention 
together. The crowd cannot think of anything to do together, 
as a crowd, and it will pull up or pull down anybody to rescue it 
from not doing anything together to announce itself to itself 
with. Making a man famous is like smoking for a crowd's nerves. 

In these newspaper days, when a man may be jerked out of bed 
by a reporter any morning, made famous while he rubs his eyes, 
have a national issue made of his beard (like Ham Lewis), or of 
his legs (like Walker), or of his knuckles (like Jack Johnson), or 



THE USES OF FAMOUS MEN 309 

of the way he parts his hair, we are slowly coming to see what 
famous men are for. It is not for a man's whiskers or his legs 
we love or abuse him. It is for the man's perfectly bare mean- 
ingless-looking fame itself that we dote on him. Why is it that 
if a man has been noticed by enough other people, millions of 
people go about in a kind of soft glory thinking about him? Why 
is it people will stand in rows before a dining-room door to see 
Rockefeller's hat? Why is it a man who looks up on Broadway 
at a sparrow eight hundred feet up on a cornice will soon have 
crowds looking with him ? It has seemed to me a mistake for 
America to overlook a fact about itself like this as of no practical 
importance, as a mere peccadillo of crowds. I have come to feel 
that nearly everything our nation dreams of and hopes for turns 
on its recognizing the bearing of this mighty, idle, ungovernable 
habit of mind of crowds, this vast park, common, or vacant lot of 
attention crowds hover around. I have believed that it is this 
very self-same wandering, eager absent-mindedness of crowds 
which shall soon be seized by true leaders, by great men and 
used daily as a mighty tool for the nation's self-revelation and 
for the nation's self-defense. 



A real great man is a crowd fulfilling itself. The crowd will 
have him. 

A famous man is a crowd twirling its thumbs, but it will have 
him. 

One sees the same principle at work in a group of people in ?. 
dark room looking at a fire together. They converge in the 
flames and enjoy it. A great man is a kind of crowd fireplace. 

He must be put down as the first necessity of a nation if it 
proposes to defend itself by self -revelation. 

It is only through knowing persons nations can be known to 
themselves or others. 

Nations are defended by self -revelation, and it is the revealed 
men who reveal the nations. 



310 WE 

The way people feel all over the world about a country's fa- 
mous men illustrates what I have to say about getting things 
done by advertising. 

Famous men are advertised men. They are the nation's 
national advertisements, the instinctive, unconscious risks and 
self-defenses of the people toward a world. 

During this last twenty years in which this nation has been 
going through the tremendous new spiritual experience of be- 
coming a great nation, of finding itself, it would be hard to over- 
estimate the value of four huge familiar conveniences it has daily 
had the use of — four colossal looking-glasses: William Jen- 
nings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and (with 
Mr. Roosevelt to set him off) Mr. Taft. 

These four pictures of America stand out vividly and for the 
rest of our lives in the working imaginations of all of us. We 
instinctively use them with ourselves and with one another 
every day to express what we do or do not want. We may not 
be quite conscious perhaps how dependent we have come to 
be on them, but there are very few of us I imagine who are not 
ready to admit that whatever else we may deny to Mr. Roose- 
velt, he has rendered an indispensable service to the nation as 
an advertising genius. This liveliness and ferment there always 
is in him, this colossal fury of not keeping out of sight, mounting 
up in him and overflowing him, so that even when he was sup- 
posed for once to be tucked safely out of sight, out of mind, five 
thousand miles away, hunting lions in Africa, we took up our 
papers every morning, day after day, and read one half column 
telling what the President of the United States had done yes- 
terday in Washington, and three columns and a half of guessing 
what the ex-President of the United States might have done, 
or might not have done yesterday, or thought he thought he 
might not have done in Africa. 

Mr. Roosevelt whirls up publicity and throws off public ideas 
everywhere he goes almost like burrs, and they are always 
sticking to people; he cannot help it and they cannot help it — 



THE USES OF FAMOUS MEN 311 

this bristling quality in him, both in speech and action, which 
has made him the great, homely, every-day convenience the na- 
tion has used to point out to everybody the definite radiating 
bristling pictures of what it will or what it definitely will not 
choose to do. Mr. Roosevelt in this regard is equally valuable 
and works equally well backward or forward. 

Mr. Taft — since Mr. Roosevelt last set him up at Chicago as 
a picture of certain ideas he wanted the nation to drop — may 
seem less to illustrate my point for the present moment. 

But Mr. Bryan and Mr. Wilson, though in very different 
fashion, can be shown to be as valuable as Mr. Roosevelt as 
pictures of the nation, or moods of the nation. 

And even Mr. Taft, while of course (like a miniature on a 
locket) he has been laid away, still represents in this country 
the typical stand-patter-patter, or stand-putter-putter, with 
whom we must be ready to reckon almost any day. (I use 
the last part of this word twice because it sounds the way I 
feel.) But standing and puttering and pattering always needs 
to be represented to the rest of us in America so that we can 
keep reminded what we do not want to do. 

But as this advertisement has been withdrawn for the time 
being, both in America and abroad, it need not be dwelt on. 

But I would like to dwell for a little on . Mr. Roosevelt and 
Mr. Wilson and Mr. Bryan as American characters, as conven- 
ient available films to distribute to foreign nations of what Amer- 
ica is like. 

What are the respective merits of these men as America's 
advertising men, as defenders by self -revelation of our American 
life? 



XV 

57 VARIETIES— BUT ESPECIALLY FOUR 

If one were to settle down to it and devote one's life to it, 
year after year, one could not describe the flavour o£ a single 
raspberry. 

All one can ever do apparently is to refer people to their own 
raspberries or to raspberries they have known. 

In trying to convey what the quality or taste or flavour of a 
nation is to another nation, reams of philosophy, acres of White 
Papers and Blue Papers, Notes and Ultimatums will not count as 
much as one single fellow human being known and seen for 
himself. 

In trying to express an abstract and comparatively new idea 
like a peaceful nation, everything turns in the long run on the 
flavour in the idea. If it does not have one, and a penetrating 
one, it will not be safe, of course, for the nation to depend on 
the idea. 

As the flavour of a nation is expressed by its public men and 
by its personalities, I am going to try to express my point of 
view in this chapter by appealing as well as I may to some one 
great common personal experience we all have had, like the 
respective flavours of Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Wilson and Mr. 
Bryan. 

It would be hard to find three flavours in the country that 
would seem more unlike to most people than Mr. Wilson's, 
Mr. Roosevelt's and Mr. Bryan's. The one point that the 
Wilson flavour and the Roosevelt and Bryan flavour may be 
said to have in common is that there is so much of it. There 
being so much of it may be said to be practically almost a flavour 

312 



57 VARIETIES— BUT ESPECIALLY FOUR .313 

of itself. They have become the natural, instinctive advertise- 
ments of what America is like. In anything that either Mr. 
Roosevelt or Mr. Bryan or Mr. Wilson would do or say, the 
flavour would average from ninety-six to ninety-eight and one 
half per cent. In most people flavour runs, say, from seven and 
one half to eleven or twelve per cent. 

This is why there can be found in the world to-day not 
more than four or five living men who can write a really great 
advertisement, one that would cover the earth and defend a 
nation. 

This is why we are able to find in America only here and there 
and once in a great while a man who can take what had been 
before a staid, worthy, and rather helpless position like being 
President of the United States and make it interesting, even 
piquant, make it everybody's fear and hope, and make it morn- 
ing, noon and night the gossip of a world. 

Mr. Roosevelt did this. He did it first. And now Mr. Wil- 
son is daily extracting out of being President of the United 
States a flavour, too. And Mr. Bryan has extracted enough 
flavour out of continually and regularly not being President of 
the United States to flavour up four or five regular Republican 
Presidents, and the flavour he got out of not being (any longer) 
even Secretary of State is one sixty nations are still tasting. 

But having said that Mr. Wilson and Mr. Roosevelt and 
Mr. Bryan are alike in being highly concentrated extracts of 
America — or of elements of American life, I have finished say- 
ing they are alike. Nothing could be more different than the 
essences in the men themselves, or more different than the way 
the essences work, or in the effect, when a little of either of them 
has been put into an idea, the idea will produce upon America 
or upon the world. 

These three leading widely different American advertising 
men or nation-revealers having between them accumulated 
this enormous national asset for America, this huge public 
property of attention which this nation can now turn on and 



314 WE 

use any day, what are the things these three advertising me:i 
can each advertise for us best? 

Nearly everybody must remember, I think, that vast por- 
trait of Roosevelt, almost as one might say landscape of Roose- 
velt, published by Collier s Weekly several years ago — a huge 
broadside of him two thousand faces strong. The faces had 
been crowded together from everywhere: platforms, drawing- 
rooms, carriages, the tails of trains, and all massed genially 
into one frame. 

Roosevelt with just one face in which to express himself would 
seem, as most people go, to get enough in, but a whole conven- 
tion of him like this picture, a kind of great shout or chorus of 
his personality, one had but once to see, as I did in a shop win- 
dow, going by one day, never to forget. 

A similar portrait of Wilson, two thousand faces strong, 
would not show up in a shop window quite so well. And if it 
were there I could hardly imagine that there would be (as there 
was that day I saw Roosevelt's) a kind of chronic crowd standing 
in front of it hour after hour, and then moving on or going in 
and buying copies. One felt as one came up the street, meeting 
people, that something had happened without knowing what it 
was. One saw all those men and women walking away from 
the little news shop in a kind of moving exultation and glee, 
each with his big roll of picture under his arm, friends and foes 
alike, all tickled to death, and all because Theodore Roosevelt's 
real likeness, at last, the very way it made them feel about 
it — his very inmost self mounting up, culminating, bursting 
with strenuousness — had been collected in fifteen by eighteen 
inches on a piece of paper. 

While no similar portrait of Mr. Wilson hung in a shop win- 
dow would get the people to stop and look at it as they went 
hurrying by, I imagine that if there did happen to be a portrait 
of President Wilson in a shop window, one single countenance of 
him enlarged would do as well as two thousand. 

And I think that the kind of people who really looked at all 



57 VARIETIES— BUT ESPECIALLY FOUR 315 

would keep looking at it again. By 'and by they would not need 
to keep looking at it again. There would be etched upon them, 
and there would become a part of them, the man who is there, a 
look of stillness, full of a kind of tremendous not-saying any- 
thing — or almost not — and just looking you through and 
through. If he is fully responding to you there would be, I 
imagine (I have never met President Wilson), a kind of happy 
apprehendingness spread upon his face, or, if he does not, just 
the silence and the thinking and X-rays, searchlights, micro- 
scopes, telescopes, wireless telegraphs, all playing on you and 
on your immortal soul and taking it quietly over for his, seeing 
down through you into your hell a little and seeing up through 
you into your heaven a little. . . . Then a word perhaps or 
perhaps not. He knows you and you know he has arrived at 
his idea of you. You are wishing you knew him. You feel it 
is a kind of One Way Street you have been on with the Presi- 
dent. Still it is this human penetration in the President which 
constitutes his value and power for the people and, while it is 
bound to seem to many people a rather chilled and immaterial 
power and they are apt to look askance at the highbrow in him 
and watch it reaching away and away ... it still has to be 
admitted after all that it is this One Way Street power in the 
President, the power of standing a little out of sight himself and 
keeping on seeing the heaven in people and keeping a lookout 
for the hell, which made it possible for him to write the first 
Lusitania note — the finest single written advertisement of what 
a great, far-seeing, big-spirited, quiet nation is like in the face of 
the panic and wrongdoing of a desperate world that this coun- 
try has ever had. 

If the President had been the kind of president people feel 
that they know, the kind that could be dropped in on at the 
White House and snuggled up to, he never would have drawn 
one side, locked himself up in the four walls of his room to find 
himself and then written from one nation to another a letter no 
nation could really retort to, a letter that has not, will not and 



316 WE 

cannot be answered for a thousand years and yet which served 
the purpose of holding the world together for another day. 

Perhaps holding the world together for another day was all 
that could be expected of one little note. 

I am not shutting myself off from the right in this book, of 
criticising the President, and I feel as keenly as he does that he 
has fallen short as yet of his vision for his country, but a vision 
for a great nation cannot be finished off, worked out, presented 
to a people in a day and thrown upon the world in a week. Or 
in a year. The policy and spirit and faith of a nation for a 
thousand years, the stupendous feat of a national imagination 
grappling with its own destiny and with the fate of a world, may 
well have taken for it by a president more time than the New 
York Sun, of course, or the New York Tribune would need. In 
the meanwhile, the President has shown that, as a writer of ad- 
vertisements for this nation, he has more imagination about 
other people at home and abroad and about himself and about 
his enemies and his friends than the White House has had in 
it for fifty years, and there is reason to hope that the slow, 
steadied quality of imagination, the quality of humanness and 
sincerity, of aloofness and perspective, bigness and keenness 
which made it possible for Mr. Wilson to write the first Lusitania 
note, throw it out into the appalling fear and hush of twenty 
nations and make the whole world draw a breath of relief, will 
yet lead the President to act and speak for the people of this 
nation and other nations in such a way as to make his adminis- 
tration one of the great landmarks of history and his name one 
of the great memories of the world. 

While from my point of view he has seemed as yet over- 
legal-minded in handling international situations and has fallen 
back too much on canned international law and dried precedentr> 
in trying to state America's hope and will and America's political 
religion to other nations, and has not struck out and expressed 
the new free soul of a great people and of a new century, and 
while he does not quite let himself go (I do have a guilty wish 



57 VARIETIES— BUT ESPECIALLY FOUR 817 

that he might forget himself and miss standing by his chair 
at luncheon at precisely fifty-nine and a half minutes past 
twelve) and while he does not allow himself quite fling enough, 
from my point of view, still, after all, it is impossible not 
to sweep one side mere intellectual theories and personal ob- 
jections, and little temperamental nigglings when I think of him, 
for I have seen that he is a man apart, that he is the one public 
man before the American public to-day who commands or 
seems to command a background in his own life into which 
he goes, who gives the sense of having something Not Him- 
self, something Not Us into which, when the need comes, 
he slips away and from which he comes back with his face 
cleared and his hand firm to act for the people. It is the some- 
thing Not Himself and Not Us to which he goes that makes him 
a man to express in due time a great people. There are mo- 
ments when there is a touch of the seer in our President. 

I have always (in a comparatively calm safe position) wanted 
to be a seer myself and, when I see a man being a seer or almost 
one in a cluttered-up place like the White House, exposed to 
Congressmen and to New York papers, all day, all night, and 
still trying patiently to be a seer, to look and to see and to hold 
steady the field glass for ninety million people, the one thing I 
live for in the world is to do what I can to keep people from 
joggling his elbow and from getting in his way. 

I am not without criticism. I am more than critical. I am 
revolutionary with hope in the President's behalf and in the na- 
tion's behalf. I have seen the revolutionary thing it means to 
us and to the dazed, stumbling governments of the world to-day 
to have a man like this — a semi-concealed seer — as President of 
the United States. 

I am a little relieved, of course, that our President does not 
look like a seer. It is only because the touch of the seer in him 
is so American and practical and because he is so plain and 
unconventional for a seer, as seers go, and so without a halo or 
anything, that he could ever have been allowed to steal in on the 



318 WE 

country as a president. Mr. Wilson has a careful instinctive 
way when any one is around of keeping his halo (at least for most 
people) in his pocket. 

But I think for myself I have caught a glint of it at times. 

Not being a Presbyterian, I do keep wishing it could be 
warmed more, and I even keep thinking that when the crisis 
comes, it will, and when I look down Washington way, as I do 
every day now, and see him — see our President standing grimly 
there with that kind of half-suggested, faint, cold rim around 
his head that might fire up into a halo any minute when the 
crisis comes and then fade out again — I want to be quick and 
ready to help. 

It is not common to have seers or near-seers in government 
positions, but when we do and when other seers or semi-seers 
are tolerated on the premises and some team-work-seeing is 
being done, great events, great nations and great presidents are 
bound to happen. 

I have always felt that Mr. Roosevelt would have made a 
great president if he had had a Lyman Abbott to be a seer to 
him instead of trying to be a seer to a Lyman Abbott. Even 
now I cannot quite give up thinking what great things Mr. 
Roosevelt might yet do for this country with a seer handy to 
put his finger on his lips or to sit with him in feverish moments 
and hold his hand. 

It is hard to imagine Mr. Roosevelt entering into the spirit 
of this, but if he could — if Mr. Roosevelt could always go 
around with a few seers about him, like secret-service men, a 
kind of personal body-guard of seers — there would be prac- 
tically no limit to the big events he could gloriously,- serenely 
chop out of Fate and lay before his country. 

But Mr. Wilson has the advantage of being in his own way 
and time his own seer. My feeling is that this being the case it 
would be well if Mr. Wilson should be asked by America to lay 
out the line of campaign and write the most important copy in 
advertising America to other nations and to itself, and that Mr. 



57 VARIETIES— BUT ESPECIALLY FOUR 319 

Roosevelt should be employed by Mr. Wilson to do special 
orders in publicity, the special bearings on and batterings in, on 
particular points Mr. Wilson should assign to him. 

Theodore Roosevelt has in him, I believe, without quali- 
fication, the devotion, the dogged, honest desire to serve his 
nation, which would make him accept a comparatively unim- 
portant-looking but amazing opportunity of team-work like 
this. He would make a stir against it at first, perhaps, but the 
first moment he really saw his assignment as it was I believe he 
would accept it with joy, bang into it with a grim, true, irre- 
pressible, humble faithfulness that would make us prouder of 
him than ever. But I do not think we should look in this coun- 
try upon Mr. Roosevelt just now as our worker in clay, or as 
our sculptor, but as our chief chiseller, as our American Na- 
tional Hewer. 

A colossal statue of Theodore Roosevelt hewing out Columbia 
would be one of the sights of all time. 

But if America wants to represent to the world and to other 
nations a figure of this nation as it is, a simple, sublime, true 
figure that shall be set in place, that shall be known, loved, and 
looked up to, in all the countries of the world, it will hand over 
with trust and with pride to Woodrow Wilson the clay, and to 
Theodore Roosevelt the block of stone. 



XVI 
MR. WILSON, MR. ROOSEVELT, AND GIDEON 

I would be grateful if the people who are trying to read this 
book would rest themselves at just this point by reading their 
Bibles from the first verse to the twenty- third verse of the 
seventh chapter of Judges. 

It is the story of what Mr. Gardner or Colonel Roosevelt would 
call, I suppose, Gideon's funny little army — three hundred people 
with pitchers. They looked nearly as funny as Chautauqua 
people do to Mr. Gardner and Mr. Roosevelt at first, I imagine, 
and yet — everybody remembers how it came out. 

'2. And the Lord said unto Gideon, The people that are with 
thee are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest 
Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying. Mine own hand hath 
saved me. 

3. Now therefore go to, proclaim in the ears of the people, saying. 
Whosoever is fearful and afraid, let him return and depart early from 
mount Gilead. And there returned of the people twenty and two 
thousand; and there remained ten thousand. 

4. And the Lord said unto Gideon, The people are yet too many; 
bring them down unto the water, and I will try them for thee there: 
and it shall be, that of whom I say unto thee. This shall go with thee, 
the same shall go with thee; and of whomsoever I say unto thee. This 
shall not go with thee, the same shall not go. 

5. So he brought down the people unto tne water: and the Lord 
said unto Gideon, Every one that lappeth of the water with his tongue, 
as a dog lappeth, him shalt thou set by himself; likewise every one 
that boweth down upon his knees to drink. 

6. And the number of them that lapped, putting their hand to 
their mouth, were three hundred men: but all the rest of the people 
bowed down upon their knees to drink water. 

7. And the Lord said unto Gideon, By the three hundred men that 
lapped will I save you, and deliver the Midianites into thine hand: 
and let all the other people go every man unto his place. 

320 



MR. WILSON, MR. ROOSEVELT, AND GIDEON 321 

8. So the people took victuals in their hand, and their trumpets; 
and he sent all the rest of Israel every man unto his tent (Colonel 
Roosevelt, Mr. Gardner), and retained those three hundred men. 

Americans would divide off a good deal like the Israelites, I 
imagine. Some Americans think with their heads. Others 
butt. Some Americans lap. Others gulp. 

Mr. Wilson (I am sorry to have to be personal) Mr. Wilson, 
if I may venture to guess, likes to taste water when lie drinks it. 

Mr. Roosevelt just likes to get it inside, the most water, the 
most promptly. One cannot imagine Mr. Roosevelt's letting 
water sink in, or letting it coolly, subtly, slowly percolate the 
soul and the meaning of its being water along his tongue. When 
Mr. Roosevelt reads a book (as everybody knows) he takes it up 
in scoops, the way a Pennsylvania locomotive drinks water — 
breathlessly, roaringly, sixty miles an hour. Probably every- 
body would admit that Mr. Roosevelt, if he was drinking from a 
brook (all alone and nobody looking), would not be a lapper. 

This little difference between Mr. Wilson and Mr. Roosevelt 
is what might be called a very big-little one. It runs through 
everything that either Mr. Wilson or Mr. Roosevelt ever does or 
thinks in trying to defend this country. 

There is something about this last verse I have just quoted 
from the Old Testament that rather haunts one when one falls to 
thinking how Mr. Wilson and Mr. Roosevelt respectively can 
best defend a country. "And the Lord said unto Gideon, By 
the three hundred men that lapped will I save you . . . and 
he sent all the rest of Israel every man to his tent and retained 
those three hundred men." 

The last thing that it would be wise for America to do, or for 
Mr. Wilson to do for America just now, would be what Gideon 
did — dismiss all these thousands of people we have in America 
who never lap — people like Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Gardner, 
and leave them out of the struggle of the nation. 

The only moral a democracy like ours has a right to draw from 
Gideon's more or less high-handed treatment of gulpers and but- 



322 WE 

ters In the crisis of his nation, is the insight into human nature 
that was back of it. We do not want to dismiss anybody in 
America from active and valued service in defending the nation. 
The best America can do in applying the Gideon story is to 
make up its mind definitely just what Mr. Wilson and Mr. 
Roosevelt are respectively for, just what Mr. Roosevelt with his 
butting style and Mr. Wilson with his quieter, slower, deeper 
lapping style, can express for it best. 



XVII 

ADVERTISEMENTS BY MR. WILSON 
ADVERTISEMENTS BY MR. ROOSEVELT 

If Mr. Wilson and Mr. Roosevelt were to undertake to- 
morrow to do team-work together in advertising the peaceful 
character of this nation, what kinds of advertisements should the 
nation assign to Mr. Wilson and what kind to Mr. Roosevelt? 

I have been looking over their pictures and studying their 
faces and thinking. 

Mr. Wilson's countenance as a national film, as a revelation 
of what an American is like and what he means by what he does 
or says, has the same kind of quality in it as Mr. Roosevelt's as 
regards its liveliness, but it is the liveliness down underneath, of 
an Atlantic cable, not of a Panama Canal, nor of a fleet around 
on top of the world, nor of flags and guns and roaring lions. 

This would seem to suggest that Mr. Wilson should be given 
the more diflBcult, delicate, skilled, and less obvious things to say 
to particular persons, to persons he has studied and listened to 
and that he understands. 

The liveliness in Mr. Roosevelt which one sees in his face has 
the same validity, the same immense sincerity, the same inter- 
national advertising value in it, but it seems to be more adapted, 
like Mr. Bryan's, to politics and conventions, to brass-band 
things, to moving over on great occasions, in big lifts, or as on 
huge escalators or moving sidewalks, from one idea to another, 
crowds of people. 

There is in Mr. Roosevelt a power, a lift-over and move-up 
genius in making people believe him, which could not be over- 
estimated in its national advertising value in dealing with crowds 

32.3 



324 WE 

of people, but one does not quite like to think what would have 
happened if Mr. Roosevelt as President of the United States had 
had it assigned to him to write the note about the Lusitania to 
the Emperor of Germany. 

He would probably have given the Kaiser a feeling that would 
have been very far removed from what the i^merican people 
wanted or intended. 

I have been thinking what it would be like if Mr. Wilson and 
Mr. Roosevelt were in the employ not of the United States, but 
of Lord & Thomas. If Lord & Thomas had an advertising con- 
tract come in from the president of a great corporation, what part 
of the copy would they assign to Mr. Wilson and what part to Mr. 
Roosevelt? One can easily imagine what Lord & Thomas would 
have to do. It would result in Mr. Roosevelt's copy being used 
largely for billboards, for county fairs, sandwich men, mega- 
phones, or for places where great swoops of ready-made atten- 
tion, of attention going by, could be had, and Mr. Wilson's copy 
would be reserved for the harder places, and he would so conceive 
it, make it so interesting, that, while it was embedded, or practi- 
cally embedded, in a crevice in the solid rock of other advertise- 
ments in the middle of the advertising section of a great 
magazine, it would gently pry through and open out its way 
through the other advertisements and make people read it. 
This is the kind of thing Mr. Wilson is practically doing every 
day. 

To Colonel Roosevelt, herds of adjectives addressed to herds 
of people are necessary, because not being a lapper, an assimila- 
tor, with a powerful sense of the qualities and meanings of words, 
he does not really notice the first, second, or third adjective in a 
sentence at all. Neither do the herds of people, of course. This 
makes Mr. Roosevelt very useful. Naturally all that America 
can conclude is that Mr. Wilson should have his subjects to ex- 
press us on and Mr. Roosevelt should have his. There are some 
subjects for instance (like subjects of diplomatic notes) that seem 
to make their appearance naturally in this world, one adjective 



ADVERTISING BY T. R. AND MR. WILSON 325 

at a time — the way human beings do. These should be Mr. 
Wilson's. Other subjects naturally seem to come into the world 
as Mr. Roosevelt^s do, in what one might call litters of words. 
These subjects should be Mr. Roosevelt's. 

And while it would be impossible in the present crisis of the 
world to overestimate the moral market value of Mr. Roosevelt's 
skill in advertising, it should be firmly kept in mind by the 
country that his particular function for us, of rousing the people 
to their self -consciousness, of being a kind of P. T. Barnum for 
the United States, is such that his genius works out into being 
best adapted to posters, to vast circuses of people, and some- 
times (I do not think Mr. Roosevelt would deny it) — in the 
stress of party politics — some pink lemonade. 

Quantities of words, quantities of musts and duties, redness, 
blueness, space, time, patience in bearing on, forty thousand 
foot-tons of repetition, herds of adjectives — all of these are logi- 
cally involved in educating and battering democracies, and mak- 
ing great public display advertisements of What a People Is 
Like. 

It is impossible to overestimate Mr. Roosevelt's value in this 
regard to a democracy like ours. But an advertisement, in 
the form of a message to Congress, Mr. Wilson does infinitely 
better. 

An advertisement of Mr. Wilson's, whether to Congress or any- 
one else, is known not by the number of adjectives he puts in but 
by the adjectives he makes people think of and leaves out. A 
touch of shrewd national clairvoyance — a mind-reading of a 
nation — a touch of curiosity, a tremendous little fact or a little 
figure — a vast reach of silence across half the dictionary and 
then the right word. 

If Mr. Roosevelt were to write one advertisement in the next 
number of the Saturday Evening Post, he would really need, in 
order to do it well and in his way, twenty white pages, and it 
would cost his client for that one number, in that one magazine, 
for one week, say, fifteen thousand dollars, and if Mr. Wilson 



S26 WE 

were to write an advertisement for the same firm he would put it 
all into one page easily, and in a sentence or so on that, and it 
would cost his client, say, one thousand dollars, which would 
save his client — well, anybody can figure it up. . . . 

And I think Mr. Wilson would get the order. I think he 
ought to get the order instead of Roosevelt from the United 
States now. 

But in the meantime considering the enormous advertising 
value of Mr. Roosevelt in a national crisis like this, at a time 
when revealing and vivid personalities are needed as never before 
in the world to advertise and dramatize ideas, we cannot think of 
America's defending herself or expressing herself to herself and 
to other nations without using to the utmost Mr. Wilson and 
Mr. Roosevelt both. 

But I do think, as I have said before, we have reason to hope 
that the campaign will be laid out by Mr. Wilson and that Mr. 
Roosevelt should show his patriotism by letting Mr. Wilson 
assign him specific copy to be written and to be displayed in 
specified quarters at specified times. 

Advertising like all other arts and forms of life may be said 
to divide off into three forms of power: motion, heat, and 
light. 

If this nation can arrange to use Theodore Roosevelt as Na- 
tional Advertising Motor, William Jennings Bryan as National 
Advertising Heater, Warmer, or Incubator, and Mr. Wilson as 
Light, everybody will know America. 

It is perhaps not unreasonable to assume that the Light should 
oversee and control the others, that the others should be switched 
on and switched off as needed and where needed by the one who 
is in the light. 



But it is not merely our great men we must use fittingly, 
economically, but ourselves. Not all people in America prob- 
ably know quite yet whether they are primarily intended by 



ADVERTISING BY T. R. AND MR. WILSON 327 

nature as motors or as radiators, or as chandeliers and indirect 
lighting systems for the country, but if we do not know yet, the 
first and most patriotic thing that we can do for the nation in the 
present crisis of the world is for each of us to find out just which 
we are at once, to sort ourselves and sort one another out, and 
go to work. 

There is no reason why an indirect-lighting-system or chan- 
delier sort of person like me should abuse motors for not being 
chandeliers, and why should I feel ugly and let all the lights in 
me go out when motors abuse me? If the radiators in a factory 
instead of warming it were to break out into saying they would 
not be warm in the presence of such cowardly poltroonified 
chandeliers, and if the motors were to slow down and swear at 
the bare sight of the radiators, and if the chandeliers (like the 
New York Evening Post, for instance, and the Boston Transcript) 
were all to go out in a funk because the motors made a vulgar 
noise, the factory would not get much done in a day 

Neither would a nation. 

And yet this is the specific thing that many Americans to- 
day seem to think they must do every morning to defend the 
country. 

We have dropped into it because we do not think. 

But the world has made us think. We are all thinking 
now. 

And now that we have been shocked into thinking at last we. 
are going to think of one another and use one another. We will 
say We. We will begin to-morrow. We will thank God for 
the motors being motors, and for all of us being what we are, 
we will find out which we are ourselves, drop into place, and 
work. 

If this division of Americans into motors, radiators and 
chandeliers seems too fanciful, anyone who prefers can fall 
back on the more simple primary one the Bible divides us into, 
of lappers and gulpers. I praise God every day as I look up 
(between laps) for gulpers. It does my heart good to hear them 



328 WE 

gulping ... (I have just heard only this morning, with 
glee. Colonel Roosevelt out in San Francisco — gulping) .... 



If I have not successfully made a place for every lapper and 
every gulper or butter in this country in this chapter I will write 
it over again. This nation is going to use with economy, 
shrewdness, joy and pride each man of us. 

Those who want to butt will take the butting departments and 
under the lead of Colonel Roosevelt will daily butt the people 
for the people. We have plenty of pile-driving and emphasis 
for them to do at home — and with other nations. 

And those who want to think and make others think will 
think and make others think for the people, will draw up the 
national design, the idea of the people, clear the idea away from 
other ideas, daily light it and keep it lighted in our minds and 
the minds of other nations. 

In this way the country will be represented honestly and will 
use us all, and we will be in a position to express clearly and in- 
cisively our national personality to ourselves and a world. 



XVIII 

MAY 15, 1915 

If everybody in the United States had had a telephone, and 
if President Wilson on Saturday morning, May 15th, the morn- 
ing after the Germans sank the Lusitania, had called up every- 
body from the White House, got the whole nation on the wire, 
counted off all the people on one side or the other, and if the 
President had then got Germany by wireless at eleven o'clock 
and had then said precisely and verbatim what America thought 
and how America felt about a nation's killing a hundred innocent 
men, women and children to get its way, it would not have 
taken the German Government seven weeks to answer President 
Wilson's first demand that Germany should promise to stop 
killing neutral men, neutral women and neutral babies of a 
neutral nation — to get its way. 

The next best thing President Wilson could arrange to take 
the place of a telephone mass-meeting of the nation was — a 
magnificent guess, an act of personal national mind-reading 
which came as near to being what everybody would have tele- 
phoned the White House as he could get. 

As Germany was aware that President Wilson (a man Ger- 
many scarcely knew) had made a magnificent guess, and as 
Germany was aware that ex-President Roosevelt (whom Ger- 
many already knew like a book, as an amazingly certified 
representative American) had made another precisely opposite 
magnificent guess, and that Mr. Bryan, the regular standing 
almost-President of America for thirty years, had made another 
still more precisely opposite magnificent guess — opposite to 
both — it is not unnatural that Germany's answer to President 

329 



330 WE 

Wilson's message from the American people has been held back 
until I have just now read it in my paper this morning — seven 
weeks late — Saturday, July 10th. 

Why is it that Germany has now decided at last that the only 
thing that is left for her to do is to promise at once to stop 
shooting at America because it is convenient in shooting at 
England? 

She has not wanted to promise to stop. She would not have 
promised it if she could have helped. 

She has decided to recognize tacitly the rights of individual 
Americans and to promise special provision for safety to Ameri- 
cans, because America at last through the aid of three famous 
men has been able to get an absolutely and hopelessly clear 
idea of just how ninety million people feel about her. 

When Mr. Roosevelt came out with his letter before the 
country, stamping and threatening at Germany, Germany said : 
" If America feels about us like this, and is likely at any moment 
to act toward us like this, she is practically our enemy anyway. 
She is going to sink us with her banks, and her trade in ammu- 
nition and there is no reason why we should endanger sub- 
marines to protect her." So Germany listened. W^as America 
like Colonel Roosevelt? Then she heard suddenly America, 
from afar, dropping Colonel Roosevelt with a thud. 

When Mr. Bryan came out with his resignation, with a great, 
vague, soft, beautiful flourish of peace waving his sweet and 
yearning soul before the President and before all nations as a 
true picture of just what America was like, Germany said: "If 
America feels about us like this, she is a great dear, of course, 
but after all if she is merely a big, pleasant, sloppy -minded, sen- 
timental, muddle-headed nation, why should we pay very much 
attention to her?" 

So Germany listened. Was iVmerica like Colonel William 
Jennings Bryan? 

Then she heard suddenly — all in a minute in one morning — 
America dropping Colonel William Jennings Bryan with a thud. 



MAY 15, 1915 331 

Germany read how scared Colonel Bryan was over President 
Wilson's course — the second Liisitania note, one morning. Then 
she read the note the next morning and did not see anything 
to be scared about. 

Then she heard the Bryan thud. Then she made up her 
mind that President Wilson was America, precisely, magnifi- 
cently America, and she saw precisely how she would have to 
act with a Wilson kind of America, and completely changed the 
tone of her press and the tone of her answer to the Lusitania 
note, and while, of course, it is not an answer that has satisfied 
us, it is an answer which both in its tone and its concessions and 
provisions Germany would never have dreamed of making or 
feeling obliged to make a few weeks ago. With two big dull 
thuds, and with Mr. Wilson, America had asserted its character, 
and Germany, while she did not do as we wished, saw what we 
were like, completely dropped her Von Tirpitz-Bernhardi tone, 
and at least began to begin at last to see that the nation with 
which she was dealing was not insipid because she had a small 
army, or stupid because she was magnanimous, or afraid be- 
cause she did not threat, and loomed up in a vast, slow, patient 
way as a nation that could not be trifled with. 



XIX 
HUMOUR IN ADVERTISING A NATION 

Why is it — I have often wondered — that I always begin a sub- 
ject by being sedate and impersonal, by writing on the subject 
about the subject, and that the moment I get under a little 
headway and care a great deal about it, I begin writing on the 
subject about people? 

All ideas seem to be people's ideas. I have discovered slowly 
and as it seems to me now with a great waste of time that it is 
not people's ideas on a subject that make things happen to the 
subject. It is the people. Most other men, I imagine, besides 
myself see ideas or at least realize ideas through people. Nine 
times out of ten one finds that the live-end of an idea, when one 
looks it over, is the end where the man is. If the idea counts, 
probably he is at both ends. 

So insensibly as the years have gone by and I have tried 
more and more to see if I could not express or almost express 
ideas, I have found myself looking for people. "Who are the 
men that go with this idea? " I have found myself asking myself. 
Never out loud and always unconsciously, but always as I look 
back I seem to have kept up underneath this insistent demand 
for some man I could use as the live or working-end of my idea. 
And now at last (as the reader has jioticed !) if I am looking about 
for the live or working-end of an idea and cannot find any other 
man at the moment, I take myself. 

I do not know whether Colonel Roosevelt, as his enemies 
like to say he is, is or is not a self -advertiser. 

I know I am. In a desperate life like the artist's in an age 
of machines, in a desperate undertaking like the artist's of re- 

332 



HUMOUR IN ADVERTISING A NATION 333 

vealing the invisible, of looming up the intangible in the great 
white heat of matter of an age like this, of conveying the spirit 
or life of ideas — I face the issue. In a crisis like the one that 
America faces to-day, I am ready not only to be advertised 
but to advertise myself to the ends of the earth if by so doing I 
can touch the imaginations, penetrate the minds and philos- 
ophies and arouse the clear good-wills or the clear ill-wills of 
nations by a vivid honest decisive revelation or picture of what 
an American is like or of what an American is not like. Then 
America can say Yes or No. One will answer the purpose of the 
nation as well as the other. A rejected , advertisement of a 
nation, rejected out loud, is as clear and helpful as an accepted 
one in clearing the minds of nations, in removing the blurs, 
the misunderstandings and the chronic bewilderments about 
human nature that are the sole cause of armaments and wars. 

I have decided that the best I can do is to accept this fact and 
to act on it whether it is becoming to me or becoming to my 
ideas or not. 

I am trying to express my age and my country and I will not 
be silenced or domineered over by a little awkward but com- 
paratively unimportant thing like my own personal modesty. 
It would be impertinent. We are all trying to save a world by 
clearing up the people in it. Everybody would be good and 
there would be no war if everybody was kept cleared up. The 
best each of us can do is to keep our type cleared up, and begin 
with being as cleared up as we can ourselves. 

My quarrel with Colonel Roosevelt as a current national 
advertisement is that while he is naive with other people he is 
not naive with himself. He does not keep cleared up to him- 
self about himself. I have the same quarrel with Mr. Bryan. 
I am in agreement with President Wilson as the most necessary 
advertisement of this nation just now because he is more cleared 
up about himself and can hold himself at arm's length more 
keenly (and yet not unkindly) than any other man we have in 
American public life. It is because Woodrow Wilson has kept 



334 WE 

his sense of humour sacred in standing for a nation and has kept 
his own imagination about Woodrow Wilson so cleared up from 
day to day that he is making such clear and clean-cut work 
with ninety million people. He gets the President right first. 
He takes more time for it than any other President we have 
had. In this way has he made of his sense of humour a great 
sacred national defense. 

I find myself opposed to Colonel Roosevelt and to Mr. Bryan 
as dangerous certified advertisements for this country to accept 
and use just now, during and immediately after this war, because 
in this tragic and solemn hour of the destiny of the world in which 
eleven nations have so far lost their sense of humour, their power 
of detachment, as to grip each other by the throat because they 
are all precisely alike in not seeing themselves as others see them, 
in a time when a sense of humour is a thing for this nation to pray 
for, as its supreme spiritual safety valve, as its supreme means in 
defending itself from itself, its supreme means in removing of- 
fense from other nations and in seeing out a way between them 
all for the peace of the world, it would be a grave risk for iVmerica 
to run to allow itself to be represented by a sentimentalist of 
peace like Mr. Bryan on the one hand, or by a sentimentalist of 
war, on the other, like Mr. Roosevelt. 

When Mr. Roosevelt came out the other day in front of the 
country, running and shouting with his little amusing excited 
falsetto threat, his whoop of defiance at all Germany, it was be- 
cause with this great steadied quiet-hearted nation banked-up 
behind him he did not see how he looked. Mr. Roosevelt can- 
not quite be called a statesman of the first class because he is 
always losing and is almost in a rut of losing his sense of humour 
about himself. God might have helped him a little more here at 
just this point, perhaps, but the fact that apparently He had 
omitted to do this, while it still leaves Colonel Roosevelt as per- 
haps America's most useful and most effective advertisement, 
fitted to special occasions and particular national moments and 
needs, while it still leaves us Colonel Roosevelt as one of the big 



HUMOUR IN ADVERTISING A NATION 335 

special conveniences of the nation, one of its machine-tools of 
statesmanship, a force or contrivance to be ordered about and to 
be assigned, like a national sand-blast, like a national steam 
shovel, or national dredge, it does not rank him as a statesman 
like Lincoln, a statesman who could put himself in everybody's 
place, make himself the superintendent of the thoughts, feelings, 
laughters and sorrows, the hopes, enthusiasms, imaginations and 
wills of ninety million extremely various widely scattered people. 
The people of America want a President with mobility and 
immour enough to act, and to act all in the same breath as Presi- 
dent of us all. 



XX 

PERSPECTIVE IN ADVERTISING A NATION 

*'Look forward and not backward, up and not down, out and 
not in, and lend a hand." I suppose that a motto that has done 
so many people good, been on so many bureaus, that has been 
read between so many hairpins and hung above so many desks, 
that has been worked on and prayed over as this motto of 
Edward Everett Hale's has, ought to be regarded with gratitude 
by all of us. But our gratitude need not interfere, perhaps, with a 
fitting sense on the part of some of us of the damage this motto 
would do people if they really lived up to it. 

Nearly all the things that can be the matter with a motto, as 
it seems to me, are the matter with this one. 

I do not deny that from a pathological point of view, and as a 
prescription for some people sometimes, it has its value : " Look 
forward and not backward, and up and not down, and out and 
not in, and lend a hand." 

But if anybody I know did all these things to himself and then 
tried to lend a hand to me I should do all I could to see that he 
was kept from lending me a hand any longer than could be 
helped. 

Of course a motto (like a mustard plaster) if applied to the 
right person in the right spot at the right time is very valuable, 
but if any man would go around or up and down the street with a 
mustard plaster offering it indiscriminately to everybody he met 
any time, the way people have gone around with this motto, he 
would be arrested. "Looking forward and not backward" no 
one can deny hits precisely the right spot for backside-forward 
people, and "Looking up and not down" may be good for steady 

336 



PERSPECTR E IN ADVERTISING A NATION 337 

or regular upside-down people, but as a general all around motto, 
this motto is almost a national menace. 

It is just because there are so many people in America to- 
day who are looking forward and not backward, and up and not 
down, and out and not in, never seeing the whole of anything, 
never seeing it in the round, that with all our whirl and stir so 
few people get anything done. 

This is especially true in the affairs of the nation. 

Who can measure what Colonel Roosevelt could do for the 
American people or be kept from doing if he would look in.^^ 

Or what Mr. Bryan could do or be kept from doing if he would 
look backward.^ 

Or what Mr. Hearst could do if he would look up? 

It is because Mr. Wilson, when he has been spending a day 
with one man after the other five minutes at a time looking out, 
slips off into a still room in the White House and sits all by him- 
self and looks in, that he does so many things in rows that he 
does not have to take back. It is because he lays hold on his own 
vision, sees himself for and against, looks in with a sense of 
humour (unlike Mr. Roosevelt) , that he has won over to himself 
at last one after the other Mr. Roosevelt's progressives, who had 
wished over and over again that Mr. Roosevelt would look in. 

It is because after looking forward with Mr. Bryan a while 
Mr. Wilson goes off by himself and looks backward hard that he 
has won over for himself and away from Mr. Bryan Mr. Bryan's 
progressives. When Mr. Bryan's progressives watch Mr. Wil- 
son, daj^ after day, doing forward things with a background of a 
few hundred years or so, from Princeton, New Jersey, they do 
not feel they need Mr. Bryan. 

It is because after spending a whole day in receiving practical 
men, men who are occupied with immediate aims and with close 
things under their noses, Mr. Wilson steps one side and leaves 
everybody alone for days (as in writing the Lusitania note), and 
looks up, that he gives the people in a wide and rare degree the 
sense that with all or any of his inevitable mistakes he is a man 



338 WE 

who has some silent hstening power above him from which he 
draws power down — that Mr. Wilson has slowly come to have at 
last before us all that simultaneous touch of remoteness and 
nearness, of being close to people and yet being set apart from 
people, which is inspiration in a statesman. 

We have never quite had this before in the White House except 
in Mr. Lincoln's days of stupendous war and of tragic crisis. 
Mr. Wilson is like this on ordinary days, or rather ordinary- 
looking days. 

I write these words as one who did not vote for Mr. Wilson, as 
one who voted (in gratitude for his timely and indispensable 
service in physicking the Republican party) for — for Mr. Roose- 
velt! 



XXI 

MR. ROOSEVELT'S FRANKNESS 

There are other reasons why the advertising services America 
desires of Mr. Wilson and Mr, Roosevelt should be carefully con- 
sidered before they are assigned to them respectively. Mr. 
Roosevelt and Mr. Wilson have very different ideas and personal 
habits with regard to the use and mastejy of our current national 
stock, or property of attention. 

There is one fact in human nature Mr. Roosevelt is always 
overlooking in his publicity orgies. He does jiot seem to reckon 
with the principle of economy of attention. 

If one lets anybody know everything about everything all the 
time, nobody's attention is really got to anything. 

Mr. Roosevelt seems to be better as a general publicity man, 
moves naturally in a swash and splurge of notoriety, in a kind of 
monotone o*f limelight, which is better adapted to stirring up 
people's minds than it is to making their minds up. It is a kind 
of muss of glory, of general noticeableness in which Roosevelt 
moves in distinction from a progress of light and of stages of 
public vision, a block signal system of getting attention, lijvc Mr. 
Wilson's. 

Mr. Wilson depends on imagination and applied imagination 
directed to public ends. With Roosevelt light is only a by- 
product of the energy of the motor and like a trolley (how often 
we have watched him !) his light may go out any minute when he 
goes up a hill, headlight and all. 

I admit that in a rare degree, Mr. Roosevelt has the true 
American national naivete. And so has Mr. Bryan. And with- 
out doubt, it is because Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Bryan have both 

339 



340 WE 

conducted themselv^es for many years like colossal boys before 
the people, like unmanageably disturbingly frank boys that 
people have feared and loved them and that they have wedged 
their way in among politicians, loomed up above them, as hon- 
estly representative, legitimately powerful American men. 

But having said this and having said that the best national de- 
fense is to depend on self -revealing men and on national naivete, 
it can do no harm to compare for the practical value to the 
country, Mr. Wilson's national naivete with Mr. Roosevelt's 
and Mr. Bryan's. 

It has seemed to me that to Mr. Wilson, national self -revela- 
tion or national naivete is the naivete of a man and not of a child. 
It does not mean a kind of incoherent inertia of frankness as it 
does to Mr. Bryan, or hand-to-mouth frankness or frankness for 
its own sake. It means a cumulative applied frankness, a frank- 
ness for the purposes of statesmanship, with a beginning and a 
middle and an end — it means a total frankness, a frankness in the 
long run. It is the kind of frankness a man would like to have 
had fifty years afterward in a history of the United States. 

In the meantime, before the fifty years are up, his worst ene- 
mies would have to grant — or any man who observes — the skilful 
absolutely unflinching sincerity in Mr. Wilson's reserves. Not 
only in his plain-spoken reserves, but in his humorous and wilful 
evasions, Mr. Wilson has been able to keep up a high standard of 
personal and official sincerity and gf trust in his sincerity, which 
alone has made it possible for the papers and the people to wait 
for him and let him have the power to do things. 

It is the way that President Wilson has used his news and his 
momentary reserves together and alternately, that has con- 
tributed most to the national self-confidence and national self- 
revelation we seek, and that has won him the conscience of the 
people, until he has been able at last to build up slowly and cul- 
minatingly out of a few words, a few deeds, and a few silences 
— this still trust in him. It grows like the trees in the night. 

It seems to me to have been a supreme feat in far-sighted. 



MR. ROOSEVELT'S FRANKNESS 341 

orderly advertising, in progressive reading of what a nation 
thought and felt and desired, and a practical wise dedication of 
its power of attention, until it could focus in him and could ex- 
press through him what it thought and felt, and could get what 
it desired. 

Neither Mr. Bryan nor Mr. Roosevelt appreciates this secret 
of mastering, wielding and dedicating to high specific purposes 
the public property of attention as the President does. 

Mr. Bryan, who has the naivete of a child, and Mr. Roosevelt, 
who has the naivete of a steam-hammer or a steam-pump, both 
stand by and watch Mr. Wilson's frankness being used with 
imagination, being used as a regulated tool for digging events out 
of the attention of a nation, for making things happen for the 
people in rows, one after the other, without quite understanding 
it. Mr. Bryan holds it in disapproval as old-fashioned diplo- 
macy. It does not seem quite sincere or natural to a man who 
has a very real but rather spatter-minded or spray-sincerity like 
Mr. Bryan's to be at once as sincere and as reserved as Wilson 
is, and Mr. Roosevelt regards it as old-fashioned diplomacy, be- 
cause from a steam-pump point of view it does not look busy, 
does not keep up a necessary din and muss of pushing. 



XXII 

COWARDS AND LIARS AND NATIONAL DEFENSE 

I have been reading in my morning paper the following letter 
from Colonel Roosevelt to Hudson Maxim and to the national 
meeting of the Security League : 

"I was saddened by the extraordinary letter sent you by the three 
young men who purported to speak for the senior class of the college 
of which they are members. The course of conduct which these men 
and those like them advocate for the nation would, of course, not only 
mean a peculiarly craven avoidance of national duty by our people 
at this time, but would also inevitably tend permanently to encouragp 
the spirit of individual cowardice no less than of national cowardice. 

"The professional pacifists, the professional peace-at-any-price 
men, who during the last five years have been so active, who have 
pushed the mischievous all-arbitration treaties at Washington, who 
have condoned our criminal inactivity as regards Mexico, and above 
all as regards the question raised by the great world war now raging, 
and who have applauded our abject failure to live up to the obligations 
imposed upon us as a signatory power of the Hague Convention, are 
at best an unlovely body of men, and taken as a whole are probably 
the most undesirable citizens that this country contains. . . . 
They . . . have been preaching poltroonery. . . ." 

I pause in the middle of Mr. Roosevelt's letter for reflection. 

If one third of this country to-day is calling all the people 
in another third cowards, and is calling all the people in still an- 
other third fools, it would seem to be desirable, before the 
country (being made up of two thirds fools and cowards in this 
way) undertakes to face other nations for the country to face 
itself. We ought to line up the two thirds cowards and fools 
that compose the nation, on the one side, and the other third, 
the third that keeps calling them cowards and fools, on the 

342 



COWARDS AND LIARS 343 

other. Then we should look everybody over and find out and 
settle once for all whether all the people who do not agree with 
Colonel Roosevelt are cowards and fools or are not. 

If Colonel Roosevelt is right we want to know it. If Mr. 
Roosevelt is wrong we gladly take opportunity to call his atten- 
tion to it. 

Perhaps two thirds of the nation, all speaking at once, could 
get Colonel Roosevelt to stop his great muss and thump of 
thinking long enough to notice us. 

At all events, I have thought that possibly in this chapter 
the cowards and fools would not mind, if with the help of my 
publishers and a thousand booksellers, I tried to speak up for 
them. 

But I will not interrupt Colonel Roosevelt any longer. He 
continues to the National Security League: 

"The prime duty for this nation is to prepare itself so that it can 
protect itself. . . . Righteousness must be put before peace. It 
is wicked to }>e neutral between right and wrong; and this statement 
can be successfully refuted only by men who are prepared to hold up 
Pontius Pilate, the arch-typical neutral of all time, as worthy of our 
admiration. . . ." 



I am a neutral. Colonel Roosevelt calls me a coward, and a 
preacher of cowardice. He mentions no names. If he did, it 
would merely be personal and we could drop the matter, but 
with one single prompt, efficient little swoop of a sentence he 
lumps all neutrals together, points the finger of scorn at us — at 
us and Pontius Pilate — calls us undesirable citizens and an 
unlovely group. We are trying to bring out poltroonery in the 
young men of America. 

I wonder if Colonel Roosevelt had been in my place and had 
just finished reading this letter of his about me and about my 
type of people, and had felt just what I felt after reading it, if 
he would have expressed himself in his reply-letter as follows! 
(I do not know that he would, but I know that I did.) I didn't 



344 WE 

intend when I wrote my letter (unlike Colonel Roosevelt) to 
let anybody see it, and it was just for my own good I wrote it. 

"Colonel Roosevelt begins in this disagreement with me by 
getting himself wrong. Of course if a man does this he can 
hardly help being wrong on less familiar subjects, like other 
people." 

(Note. This is not near as much like Colonel Roosevelt as 
I ought to be able to get. I will try again) : 

"When Colonel Roosevelt has one of these spells of his, 
works himself up into a kind of fine virtuous rage of muddle- 
headedness about himself and then proceeds to lay down the 
law to others, all anyone can do is to go straight to the centre 
of Colonel Roosevelt's subject, i. e., of course to Colonel Roose- 
velt himself (as he would be of any subject) and deal with that 
first." 

(Note. This is better, but it seems to fall short in some way. 
Here is another) : 

"To Theodore Roosevelt: When you say to me, * You and 
Pontius Pilate,' when you say to me, 'You are a coward!' all 
I can say is, * You are another ! ' 

"You are a mere big windy helpless fisty fellow and when 
you are in the presence of wrong and of wrong-doers, you are 
too scared not to fight. You don't dare depend on your power 
to stand up to them, to face them down, and make them under- 
stand you. You are in a state of panic before your own futility, 
before the loginess and sogginess of your own soul to get itself 
into the word — to get itself into the look that shall master and 
still the hearts of nations!" (I'm getting into the swing of it 
now.) "You demand armament, and demand that all young 
men in colleges and stores and factories shall be trained in fight- 
ing and fighting-thinking because you are in a state of muddle- 
headed bully -witted panic. You — you — you — you are yourself 
in your own soul and body to-day way over here, three thousand 
miles off, a little frantic loose lonely flying fragment in this 
huge, cool, sane country — a spore or germ, a cast-off bacillus — 
of what is the matter with Europe. What is the matter with 
Europe is what is the matter with you and you are trying to 
make us all as scared as you are." 

I might have added (as I do herewith): "And what is the 
matter with Europe and with you is the matter with me now 
while I am writing this letter." 



COWARDS AND LIARS 345 

So much for what I might have said to Colonel Roosevelt if 
I had followed the little spiritual patterns, the immediate artistic 
effects that Mr. Roosevelt's choice of words produced in my 
mind the first few minutes after reading his letter about me 
and about other neutrals, and about Mr. Wilson, and about 
Pontius Pilate. 

What I would say now is this : 

"It seems to me, Colonel Roosevelt, if I may be allowed 
a word, you do not say what you really mean when you call 
me a coward. You get yourself wrong. You do yourself an 
injustice. The idea you are really standing for and that you 
are really trying to express is, that if you did as I was doing, 
you would be a coward. You have merely failed to make the 
distinction between your being you and my being me. You 
have taken me and some eighty million people who are being 
neutral like me and with one glorious swoop you have assumed 
that we are being neutral for the same reasons and motives and 
with the same gifts as you. It seems to us that you ought to 
have really noticed us by this time and noted that possibly we 
may have gifts for being neutral, for making our neutrality 
terrific, for making it implacable with an enemy, that we have 
good-natured and quietly conclusive gifts for getting our way 
by making people understand what our way is, by making 
people feel identified with us in spite of themselves, drop 
their guns and run toward us saying, 'Yes, Yes!' — which you 
lack. 

"Is it not barely possible that you have not taken time yet 
to notice our gifts? 

"At all events you must let us have the courage of our way 
of defending ourselves as you 'have the courage of yours. 

"We do think our gifts are more important in the world 
just now than yours. 

"In Europe nearly everybody has yours, and they have been 
tried, and you see how they work. 

"But at its worst the question at issue between us, the one on 
which Americans about us are going to take sides from ocean 
to ocean in the next few months, is not whether you are a 
coward or I am a coward. If I call you a coward because you 
are not like me, I am an unfit person to have the lives and 
destinies of a nation that has as many kinds of people in it as 



346 WE 

this one placed in my hands — i. e., as long as I keep on calling 
them cowards for not being like me. 

"And as long as you call me a coward — in the same spirit 
you are an unfit person, too." 



The fit person, as it seems to me, is some person (like the one 
we have now) who will daily recognize and daily use in defense 
of the nation the courage of us both, and all the different other 
kinds of courage the nation can produce, 

I do not despise the man who wants this nation to carry a 
revolver in its hip-pocket. I think I know how he feels. It is 
the kind of courage I have had myself, that I am being driven 
to the verge of over and over myself. I have not yielded to it 
because I have seen that other kinds of courage (in me at least) 
could be made to work better. It is not every man who during 
this ordeal of war to-day has had a book like this tugging on his 
soul, every day, to steady and true his heart with and love the 
world with. 

Many and many a morning, as I have read my morning paper 
and have felt in the old familiar way my hand feeling toward 
my hip-pocket, have I rushed to my study, taken up the next 
chapter in this book instead. Only God knows how morning 
after morning I have fought for words, for one more symbol, 
to express and defend my nation and throw it up on a great 
screen before the world, where all would know us, fear us, and 
love us. Then my hand would cc^me back from my hip-pocket 
while I was trying! 

I like to think it is so with all of us in America. If each of 
us will keep himself busy expressing himself and others about 
him, fulfilling himself and others about him in his daily work, 
and making that daily work the art-form in which he expresses 
and makes manifest to all the peace, the realer, deeper under- 
peace that is in his heart, all nations shall have a happy fear and 
trust toward us and we shall not need to drill our young men 
with muskets, train our little children in the small, mean habit 



COWARDS AND LIARS 347 

of being ready for enemies, in the spirit of physical self-defense, 
teaching them to shoulder the arms, to sing the songs and the 
ideals of martial days, to pray the prayers of mere patriotism 
and of mere self-defense, training them daily, as all poor little 
children were trained of old, in the poetry and music of dread. 



I am not afraid. 

I feel that if people know me they will not want to fight me. 

I feel that I can express myself so that they will know me and 
that I can get them to express themselves to me. Why should 
a nation not be the same? 

Peace courage (so-called) is self-consciousness or conscious- 
ness of who one is, what one is like inside, and power to express 
it. 

Fighting courage is just the opposite. We have to have an 
army to protect the country, not from the enemy, but to pro- 
tect it from the men in the country who are afraid. 

Other nations to-day are pointing to Mr. Roosevelt, to Mr. 
Lodge, and to Mr. Gardner and saying: '* These men are what 
America is like. You see these men? They are afraid of us. 
You see them as typical Americans standing for all America, 
depending on physical force instead of on their real force. So 
we must suspect them, watch them, and be ready to fight them." 
Mr. Roosevelt makes people want to fight him. He even makes 
me want to fight him. He makes great nations want to fight 
him, and be ready to fight any ninety million people that may 
be mixed up with him. Then Mr. Roosevelt demands a double 
army and navy, demands that we shall pay a bill of eight 
hundred million instead of four hundred million dollars a year 
to protect this country from Theodore Roosevelt. 

Mr. Roosevelt is a man of gestures and pounding fists. He 
cannot express himself in other ways. 

Some of us can. 

He wants a continent of Roosevelt s to confront the world 



348 WE 

with. This drives me to suggest what could be done with a 
continent of Lees! How many Lees are there? I want to 
find out. I have httle faith in Mr. Roosevelt's hip-pocket. 
Nor in smiling and shooting. I do not like to look forward for 
a hundred years — to see this nation going smiling about the 
courts of Europe with a gentle, courteous, affable pistol, with 
Mr. Roosevelt's "Smile, damn you!" philosophy. 

It is the habit of befuddled compromise like this that has 
brought on the war. I believe America is with me in this. I 
believe that America is down in its heart more like Walt Whit- 
man with regard to war than it is like Mr. Roosevelt. I was 
pleased to read in my paper the other day Mr. Gardner's re- 
mark about his letter on national armament. "If I thought 
that the newspapers would print it or that anyone would read 
it, I could continue this letter indefinitely." 



XXIII 
THE RIGHTS OF A SAPHEAD 

It is a curiously simple-minded thing for a mind to do that 
has any energy at all— to lop down into the ide^v that one side 
is right and the other side is wrong in a fight. 

Both sides are always wrong in a fight. We have all been in 
fights ourselves and we know (afterward) that this was true of 
ours. Both sides in a fight have got to be untangled before 
taking sides makes a truth count. Both sides in a fight have 
got to have their minds, hearts and legs and fists, their mutilated 
souls and bodies, ideas and abdomens unravelled from one 
another before the truth can even begin to begin to be seen. 
One cannot take sides in a huge immeasurable struggling heap 
or whirling eddy of truths and faces. 

Who are these people, these immortal beings, who are twist- 
ing up their souls and bodies in this huge tumult of shot-off 
legs, of eyelessness, of poisonous gas, of religion and thunder, 
shells, ideals, culture and disembowelment, that we men who 
stand by and see things quietly and as they are should be bullied 
by them, should be compelled to join in and help, join in and 
help convincing people by disembowelling them on one side, 
instead of joining in convincing them by disembowelling them 
on the other .^ 

A man who stands quietly by a hell like this, who will let him- 
self be hurried and bullied in his mind by the people who are in 
it, a man who has not the courage to stand alone by the truth, 
sorting some of it out on the one side and some on the other, who 
yields his truth up and slumps down into one side or the other, is 
a coward. 

349 



350 WE 

No — I cannot say it. It is the way the sentence naturally 
ends, but I have never known a coward. Any man does as 
bravely with what he sees as any man would do. I will not call 
Colonel Roosevelt a coward. I would rather say he is simple- 
minded. He does not make his mind work, make it drive through 
until it sees through itself. 

Colonel Roosevelt and I have no essential differences. We 
each have the same attitude toward what we see. But it seems 
to me I have made my mind work harder than he does his. I 
have seen and compelled myself to see in spite of my sympa- 
thies and hopes and fears that in war or in murdering to 
get one's way it is impossible for both sides not to be in the 
wrong. 

Even if one side is all in the wrong, and the other side is all in 
the right, I am necessarily against either side because they have 
both agreed to commit the greatest wrong of all in trying to 
bring to pass right ideas by murdering ideas into people instead 
of expressing ideas into them. 

An idea which has to be got into people's minds by murdering 
people instead of expressing people, I think can wait. I will not 
kill a man to get my way. I will express my way. If I do not 
know what my way is enough to express it to him except by 
standing up and killing him, I will stand up to him and let him 
kill me. 

If any man is going to die in my struggle to express myself, I 
want to see to it that I am the man. 

I am an artist. I will die to express myself. This is my only 
difference with Colonel Roosevelt. He prefers to kill someone 
else when he is whipped in expressing what he wants and I do 
not. Even when I am called a coward by Colonel Roosevelt I 
do not feel driven to kill people to convince them. If making an 
idea wait until I can express it and know enough about it to ex- 
press it, if fighting to express an idea makes me a coward, a 
aiollycoddle and a saphead, as Colonel Roosevelt says it does, if 
fighting to express my enemy and to express myself in the same 



THE RIGHTS OF A SAPHEAD * 351 

breath, makes me a coward, a mollycoddle and a saphead, I will 
stand henceforth on the top of Mount Tom and announce to all 
the world, to the end of my days, " I, Gerald Stanley Lee, am a 
coward, a mollycoddle and a saphead." 



XXIV 
THE LAST MURMUR OF A MOLLYCODDLE 

If I could convert Colonel Roosevelt to my idea of war I could 
convert the world. Converting the world would be a by-product 
of converting Colonel Roosevelt. The fundamental cause of all 
war is a personal habit of Colonel Roosevelt's. 

If I or any man or body of men to-day could cure Colonel 
Roosevelt of the habit of calling people cowards and liars, war 
would stop. 

I do not know (in a way) that ]Mr. Roosevelt can be blamed 
for calling me a coward. 

Colonel Roosevelt calls people who do not agree with him 
cowards and liars because he cannot express himself. 

All it means is that Colonel Roosevelt simply cannot contain 
himself when he contemplates me. I ought not when I think of 
it, to take the remark as being about me at all and as pertaining 
to me or expressing anything about me. It is merely to be taken 
as revealing Colonel Roosevelt's unintellectual and inexpressible 
condition, the whirl of meaningless energy in his mind when he is 
being disagreed with. People like me arouse in him feelings and 
thoughts which to a simple, thoughtless nature like his are too 
deep for ordinary words out of the dictionary and too subtle for 
actions. Ordinary words from a dictionary and ordinary actions 
are always failing Colonel Roosevelt because he cannot assimi- 
late them and make them mean things. All Colonel Roosevelt 
can express is his colossal state of inexpressibleness. He does 
this very well. Well, as I was going to say, it is this ache or colic 
of words in Colonel Roosevelt, this distress he has inside, this 
futility in clearly conveying ideas and finding pleasing art-forms 
for his feelings, which is always leading him and leading all 

352 



THE LAST MURMUR OF A MOLLYCODDLE 353 

his scattered currents of thought down into a common fight as 
naturally as water flows into a trough at the bottom of a hill. 

A man who is always getting cornered into calling people 
liars and cowards is sure to fight. 

A man who is always underlining, who is always italicizing 
with words, soon gets into italicizing with fists, dreadnoughts, 
ultimatums and guns. 

Fighting is never a new action. It is merely the final finishing 
off of calling people liars and cowards. 

The way to keep Colonel Roosevelt from calling people liars 
and cowards would be to have some one express his emotions of 
not being able to express himself — for him. If I could express 
his emotions toward people for him and clear out his mind for 
him toward people, he would not have to call them cowards, 
liars, then. 

I do not wish to blame Colonel Roosevelt for fighting any more 
than I do for calling me a coward. I ought to try to account for 
him, I ought to try to express his emotions and give him relief — 
so that he will not feel so helpless. 

I might stand up of course and say that Colonel Roosevelt's 
saying I am a coward is a perfectly plain helpless flat-footed 
whopper. But it is not cowardice in him that makes him say a 
thing like this. I ought to be patient and ought to remember 
that it is a lack of spiritual energy, of still light, of imagination, a 
kind of laziness and effeminacy in his mind which makes him 
fail to fight his way through to ideas — fight his way past himself 
to other people. 

It makes me sorry. That is all. I admit that it is contrary to 
my own impression as far as it goes, if I am a coward — I who 
have gone about all my life daily, in the dark, in the light, 
walking along precipices of opinion, with all my relatives and all 
my friends and half my little world about me holding on to my 
coat tails, since anyone can remember, all sure this next time 
that now I was going over the edge — I who from the day I was 
born have faced, and faced deliberately, ostracism and poverty 



354 WE 

and oblivion and laughter, every day of my life for twenty years 
— to express my own idea in my own way. . . . Anyone open 
any book anywhere ... Is there scarcely a sentence I 
write that does not scare people (this one for instance?), that 
does not make many people afraid for me or for themselves or 
for the world, and when I try sometimes in a feeble hopeful way 
to fix places over in a book a little so that I will not scare them, I 
scare them more than ever. There is no credit or discredit or 
courage in this. It is the way people's imaginations are made, 
and it is the way one particular imagination, if it is going to work 
at all, has to work, but it does seem to me that it ought to count 
enough to make Colonel Roosevelt's calling me a coward a 
rather loose statement. 

There are two rules that have occurred to me for people who 
have been called cowards and liars by Colonel Roosevelt. There 
are so many of these people that I have thought they might find 
these rviles helpful in trying to defend themselves : 

First, when Colonel Roosevelt calls you a coward, get him to 
say it again. This ought to be enough. 

If it is not enough, the best way to defend yourself will be to go 
about mentioning it and telling everybody you have been called 
a coward by Colonel Roosevelt. Everybody will understand 
you. Everybody will know what has happened. It is just 
Colonel Roosevelt once more giving up on expressing himself. 

The appeal to force is already getting to be seen by all — in its 
spiritual essence, as what it really is. Force or the threat of 
force in a man, instead of being terrible and magnificent and self- 
possessed as it is in a lion, is a helplessness in the mouth, a 
mumbling, a sickness of expression — the final feebleness of self- 
revelation. 

And while Mr. Roosevelt, in his famous purple-faced inter- 
view about the Lusitania, is of course entitled to have Lis own 
private feeling that what he is displaying is virility or courage, to 
the rest of us from the point of view of our modern masterful 
advertising world, from the point of view of the more modern 



THE LAST MURMUR OF A MOLLYCODDLE 3oo 

shrewd unyielding art of making things happen, Mr. Roose- 
velt's threat of fighting is merely Mr. Roosevelt at his worst and 
when he has lost his head. I cannot believe that Mr. Roosevelt, 
with all his inner resources as a public man, is going to take this 
weakest spot in his own equipment — the killing, shooting Nim- 
rod streak, the mountain lion roar in his own temperament — and 
try to make a national gospel out of it; and I believe when he 
once sees or is made by the rest of us to see how little he repre- 
sents the nation in this matter, and how much we prefer to ex- 
press and how clearly we see how to express ourselves in other 
ways, he will not try to force his way upon us. 



In the meantime, however, the question of war for America 
and for modern life all turns on the answer to one simple inter- 
national but personal question. Any man can ask it of himself. 
I am asking it of myself. How can I express Colonel Roosevelt 
so that he will keep from calling people cowards and liars? 

If I could do this I would have done, as on one high vast plat- 
form before the world, what has got to be done to everybody, 
before war is stopped. 

Then anybody could see how it was done. Then it could be 
done to everybody. And then war would stop. 

Colonel Roosevelt once expressed, would subside into a great 
or peaceful man, the kind of a man with whom wars are un- 
necessary, impossible and unthinkable. 

The world would subside with him. 

The doom of war is the artist. Without exception in all cen- 
turies and in all ages the artist is the peaceful man because he is 
an expressed man. 

The doom of war is the self-expression of the people. This is 
why what I have to say in the following section about every man's 
being an artist, about business as a dramatic expression of men's 
lives, about trade as an art-form, has such an immediate and 
stupendous bearing on the doom of war. 



XXV 

WAR-MOONING 

A sentimentalist may be called a person who has an emotion 
which he cannot express, and which if he did express he would 
not have. Expressing it would make him see he did not want it. 

The way to oppose a sentimentalist is either to make him 
express his emotion or express his emotion for him. 

As Mr. Bryan is a sentimentalist about peace, Mr. Roosevelt 
is a sentimentalist about war. 

He has an emotion about war that will not stand being ana- 
lyzed or stand being expressed. 

If anybody could really express in America Mr. Bryan's or 
Mr. Roosevelt's emotions for them, as they really are, so that 
they would prefer different ones, it would save the country. I 
would like to try for a moment to express what Mr. Roosevelt's 
sentiments and emotions about war really mean. He is not 
alone in having these quite enjoyable emotions. A great many 
people have them — all the people who are rather glib with the 
word War or the threat of War. As I see these people all around 
me, little groups of them, every few days, going about waving at 
the world a weak, abstract, comparatively pale lady -like water- 
color word like "War," I have fallen to wondering what they 
think they mean. 

When one strips away the sentimentality and looks at the 
facts what is war? 

W^ar is getting one's way by murdering or threatening to mur- 
der people who will not let one have it. 

If people would be downright with themselves and call war 
by its right name, we would soon be rid of it. 

8.>G 



WAR-MOONING 357 

All one has to do is to suppose for a minute. 

Suppose there were a law, an international law, which would 
compel a man every time he wrote down the word war to cross 
the word war out and put in murder instead? People would soon 
flinch about war and war preparedness. 

It is only sentimental half-expression and half-realization 
that makes talk about war possible. If someone could go 
through for this country all the speeches and articles that are 
going to be published about shooting-preparedness in the next two 
months and cross out the cover-up words or stained-glass words 
in them and put in instead real, clear-cut, plate-glass words, 
the fight for shooting-preparedness would be wrecked in a week. 

It is only by glazing things over, by blurring edges of facts, 
by lying and statistics and abstraction, by blowing band music 
gold lace and glorj^ in people's eyes and by smothering out live 
words in people's mouths and putting in dead words instead 
every time war is spoken of, that we are able to tolerate war 
to-day even on paper — even on each other's lips. 

The gentlemen we have appointed in this nation as our 
specialists in murder and that we look upon as our special ex- 
perts in getting our way for us by force, are men of fine bearing 
and they wear good clothes and work hard at their profession, 
and when one meets them in gold lace and epaulets at a recep- 
tion one does not like to think very much as to just what the 
details of their business are. We do not like to think of them 
without a veil of sentimentality, to think of them downright 
and straightout and plainly and according to the facts — to 
think that these polished gentlemen we are in the presence of 
have been hired by us and are daily drawing pay from us to act 
in our behalf as the thugs of our culture and as the highwaymen 
of our rights. 

We would not like to speak of their profession in this way, 
but what would happen to it if we did? 

If for the next six months the peace-people would stop vo- 
ciferating and arguing and would always speak quietly of our 



358 WE 

Secretary of War as The Secretary of Murder or as The Secre- 
tary of the United States Department of Threatening and Kill- 
ing, we should soon be hearing things from our Department of 
War. 

The Department of War will say to us: "We ^re really in 
effect a Department of Peace." 

Then, if they are, we will take them at their word. We will 
insist as a people every time we speak of our War Department 
for the next few months in speaking of it as our Department of 
Peace. 

Then things would begin to happen. 

If we call it our Department of Peace, of course, we will soon 
have to proceed to insist upon picking out men for it versed in 
the arts of peace — peace-experts, advertising men, dramatizers, 
geniuses in getting their way with nations by getting their atten- 
tion instead of by shooting or being ready to shoot. 

Having an efficient Peace Department does not mean our 
employing mere diplomats or men who have a knack of thinking 
up between nations quibbles and tricks for not-fighting. It 
involves our employing men of genius and experts in making 
huge aggressions upon the attention of a world — men with a 
sheer national power of concentrating the attention, the imagina- 
tion and the wills of the people and the power of lighting up all 
things and all men, and crowding fighters from off the face of the 
earth. 

The kind of men we have in our War Department now would 
not be able to do the work if we called it plainly and honestly 
our Peace Department. 

Any ordinary American advertising firm with an appropria- 
tion of half a dreadnought a year would do more in the way of 
keeping its own country defended than all the war departments 
of the world put together. 

We would probably have to turn out our generals and our 
admirals in our Peace Department and put in Lord & Thomas 
instead. 



WAR-MOONING 359 

But, of course, most generals and admirals being straightout 
and downright men, would resign of themselves. 

If there are generals and admirals who will not resign them- 
selves and who still keep on telling us politely that peace is all 
they are interested in, then we will take them at their word, 
offer them Lord & Thomas to join in with them and help them in 
doing their Peace- work. We will try natural selection in the 
peace- work of the War Office. 

Who would be in control of our Peace Department in six 
months — Lord & Thomas or the generals and admirals.^ 

This would be one way to do. But probably a better way to 
begin, would be not to have very much said about our War 
Department being a Peace Department. We would not really 
like the idea of pulling down the sign over the War Depart- 
ment and putting up the sign on the door "Peace Depart- 
ment." 

We would rather begin by calling things as they are by 
their right names. We may be sentimental in this country 
in spots, but we cannot be sentimental ninety millions at a 
time. We want to have the men who have taken our war 
equipment in charge on sea and land accorded by the people 
honest, straightout manly titles for their various stations: 

U. S. Manager of Shooting from Behind and Under Water 

U. S. Secretary of Asphyxiating Gases 

U. S. Superintendent of Murder in the Air 

The barber who tries to conceal the extreme humble hirsute- 
ness of his calling by calling himself a Tonsorial Artist or 
a professor has been laughed out of America. We prefer 
in America our plumbers as plumbers and not as sanitary 
engineers. 

The time has gone by, especially with this present war going 
on before our eyes, when a general or an admiral can any longer 
dodge behind vague, high-sounding names for his business. 
The same American people that has laughed sentimental toggery 
out of its barbers and out of its plumbers from one end of the 



3G0 WE 

country to the other will soon laugh it out of its generals and 
admirals. 



I have no quarrel in this book with the character, the high- 
niindedn^ss and big motives of the generals and admirals I 
know and that we all know. I am merely pointing out that as 
Complete Guides to Peace for America, as philosophers or as 
readers of human nature or masters of their nation or their age, 
there is no reason why we should defer to them. 

When we want or need a specific piece of craftsmanship in 
killing done or a big engineering feat of looking terrible, we 
defer to them, but we think the deference we give to them should 
be definite and clear-cut — should be for the specific gift that 
generals and admirals have for expressing to other nations how 
afraid we are of them and how armed we are against them in 
their own particular professional way. It seems to us that 
generals and admirals as a class have a tendency to make a 
nation moon about war. 

We are at heart a plain, unsentimental people and generals 
and General Staffs seem to us visionary and sentimental about 
the way war works in our modern life. 

I read of a sewing-machine factory in Germany the other day 
that had been completely turned over to making guns to shoot 
its customers. This factory is but one of thousands in Germany 
that have been made all over and equipped throughout as com- 
plete factories for shooting their customers. 

This strikes us in America, with our plain and probably in- 
glorious and raw fashion of looking at things, as a sentimental 
and windy way to defend the interests of a people. 

Each of these thousands of factories to-day, in addition to 
spending its money in shooting the customers from whom its 
money comes, is now engaged daily spending the money it has 
left, in driving its customers to shoot it. The very money that 
its customers might be handing over to its salesmen for goods 



WAR-MOONING 361 

the factory is now busy every day in compelling its customers 
to spend in shooting it and its salesmen instead. 

"Do not buy from us. Shoot us," all Germany is saying to 
all France and to Russia, Italy and England to-day. The 
German workingmen, the German factories, the German sales- 
men and manufacturers in millions are rushing out triumphantly 
crying, "On to Paris! We are going to wipe France as a market 
from off the face of the earth ! We are going to put Frenchmen 
for six generations where they will not have a sou to buy things 
from Germans." 

This has a fierce decided tone and there is a kind of heroic 
flourish that goes with it which is rather becoming to it, perhaps, 
but it reminds me of a baby I^heard of last night, the small son 
of a college president, who, when he cries at night and cannot 
get what he likes, takes his own poor little round head and dashes 
it nobly against the side of his crib. 

This is what half of Europe is doing now, each nation coming 
out nobly with brass bands and flying flags and dashing out i ts 
brains before the world instead of using them. Why should 
America do it.^ Why should not America be so overwhelmingly, 
so glaringly, so exhaustively unprepared to dash its brains out, 
so busy using them, that no one would think of armaments 
against us? 

For only one reason — because Colonel Roosevelt has an 
unbusinesslike sentimental mind and is afraid of the armies of 
Europe. 

As the average plain American looks at it, the only fear the 
armies of Europe can ever reasonably give to us is that at any 
time they might of course fall to and fight, killing off each other. 
Having several millions of one set of our customers in Europe 
falling to and shooting off several millions of the others may 
reasonably cause, if one looks at it in a sordid way, or looks 
a few years ahead a certain amount of fear in America for the 
regular process and machinery we have for living our lives. 

It does involve, it is true, a certain personal danger to us to 



362 WE 

have millions of our customers wipe millions of our other cus- 
tomers off the face of the earth. The $10,000 a minute that we 
see France is spending on killing our German customers, and 
the $15,000 a minute Germany is spending on killing our cus- 
tomers in their own country and in England and Russia, foots 
up to something like $50,000,000 worth a day — of its market — 
in all, which America is seeing shot away from American fac- 
tories and American inventions and blown up into the air. 
But this damage that is being done to us stops with our fac- 
tories. It stops with our Iron and our Wood and our Things. 
It does not commit the great moral physical injury upon a great 
people of being the toughs of their own culture, of having Amer- 
ica hang itself like a millstone on the neck of the world as one 
more thoughtless, helpless shooting nation. 

America could do more injury to itself and expose and weaken 
itself more in one year by warping itself into a military nation 
than the armies of Europe in a hundred years could hope to do 
to it. We can only injure ourselves if we stop being ourselves 
and stop being a level-headed, articulate expressing and adver- 
tising people and become a threatening and shooting one be- 
cause Colonel Roosevelt is afraid or because Colonel Roosevelt 
is sentimental about war. We would rather spend our money 
in getting Colonel Roosevelt not to be sentimental about war 
and in getting him to stop mooning about blood and glory and 
to accept a definition of war which will bear analysis and bear 
thinking about. 

War is taking food out of the mouths of children. War is 
invariably a cowardly attack on women. It is self -deceived 
and visionary for men to threaten war, as if they were threaten- 
ing other men. War is attacking other men's mothers and 
throwing their dead sons at them. War says: "If you do no* 
let us have our way, we will make your mothers wish they had 
never conceived and your children wish they had never been 
born." Unless the little word umr — with its three foolish little 
letters^ — gets this idea in, it does not say what it means. 



WAR-MOONING 363 

War is convincing people's brains by blowing their arms and 
legs about and scooping out their entrails. 

The talk about war's being an education, about its being a 
science, would be over in a thousand newspapers in a single 
week, if every time anybody spoke in his paper of war for a week, 
the editor would cross out the sentimental phrase "the science 
of war" and call it precisely what it is, namely, the science of 
convincing people by disembowelling them. The more of a 
science it is and the more specialized and efficient people be- 
come in it, the more romantic, sentimental about themselves 
and what they are doing they have to be. 

War of self-defense is little better. War of self-defense is 
the science of disembowelling half the world to convince them 
that they have no right to disembowel us. This not only does 
not seem to Americans to make sense, but as anybody who looks 
at Europe to-day can see at a glance, it does not work. 



The other day some soldiers who had killed all the men off in 
a village took considerable pains and ran not a little risk to save 
the life of an old woman. 

One cannot but be glad that they did it on first thought, but 
such gladness as some of us have is almost entirely on their 
account. 

It seems to us inconsistent to shoot a woman's husband and 
her four sons and then save her life so that she can miss them 
more than she would if she were dead. 

This inconsistency in war seems to us a proof of how muddle- 
headed people who fight and who threaten to fight are, and of how 
carefully muddleheaded they have to be kept in order not to 
stop fighting and stop threatening to fight at once. 

The threat of war which Colonel Roosevelt indulges in and 
wants organized, wants set up before us every day, which he is 
trying to make a national institution out of, is worse and more 
dangerous than war, because it is less dramatic and can be 



364 WE 

muddleheaded without being found out. The war- threat or 
war-prepared idea — the idea of having a standing fear and of 
having a standing army or a standing threat, does not have so 
many people against it, because the senseless horror in it is 
postponed and the bill is charged. War itself in the field begins 
to pay up. 

Even in the field a soldier only manages to keep on fighting 
to-day by having things picked out for him to do that he cannot 
see. It is by picking out murders that are far away and blurred 
— shells, long-range guns, that he keeps on murdering. Statis- 
tics of thirty thousand people, for instance, starving to death 
will not make a soldier as inconsistent as one real baby crying 
for a real bottle, when it has probably already had enough, in 
the next room. 

A soldier's imagination is really touched by murdering a 
man's children, or by cutting off the breasts of his wife. He 
really sees, when it has really been done, when it is something 
so obvious that a tiger would notice it — just what he is doing. 

People can only fight in an essentially mussy-minded state or 
in a kind of moral fog. When something shows up as it really 
is, when fighters see what they really do a minute, they are in- 
stantly inconsistent. Having shot the old woman's husband 
and four sons, they apologize by saving the old woman, so that 
she can sit and think about her dead husband and her four dead 
sons. 



XXVI 
MORE WAR-MOONING 

The other day the students of the University of New York 
jjetitioned the faculty against the estabhshment of a course 
in miUtary science. They said that mihtary science did not 
interest them. 

Thousands of students in our American universities have 
started up thinking for themselves. As the next fifty years 
of America are of especial interest to young men, and as the 
world that is being arranged just now by Colonel Roosevelt and 
others is the world they will have to live in, it is perhaps not 
unnatural that they should take it for granted people would be 
interested in what they think, would like to know how they feel 
about arrangements for a world they will have to live in. It is 
possible that one arranged by Colonel Roosevelt might not 
suit them. As Colonel Roosevelt will doubtless have the 
privilege of backing away from the world he is dabbing at after 
a little and will not have to live in it, they might be considered 
perhaps — these young men — in some sense as not only interested 
but as authoritative on a world — say from 1915 to 1965. The 
more signs they show of thinking for themselves the next few 
years, the better their 1915-1965 world will fit them when they 
get it. The signs are that among our younger American men 
to-day, especially in our colleges, fighting can be shown to be 
identified with intellectual effeminateness, spiritual anaemia — a 
lack of self-assertion against machines, against the conventional 
or machine conception of human nature and the king-and- 
battle idea of history. History is a vast melodrama of kings 
with chips on their shoulders, and Colonel Roosevelt like a small 

365 



366 WE 

boy in the front row of the Family Circle is still fascinated by 
History and full of a fine left-over sentimentality about war, 
but the rest of us have not been fascinated by the vast melo- 
drama of history — we look at it freshly personally and from a 
vividly American point of view. The typical young men in our 
American colleges do not want to imitate history. They want to 
make some. They are not impressed by force in the way history 
seems to be, and they do not want to impress other people 
with it. 

If the fighting and threatening students in our colleges — the 
advocates of frenzied preparedness — could be stood up in one 
row and the peaceful ones all stood up in another, and if 
Colonel Roosevelt could be asked to go along both rows and 
look them over there is reason to believe that Colonel Roosevelt, 
if he did not know which row was which and had to pick out 
one i:ow rather than the other to help him defend the country, 
would find after it was all over, to his dismay, that the row he 
had picked out as having the most nerve in it, was the row of 
peaceful men. They would have another kind of courage. 
There would be exceptions in both rows. 

Colonel Roosevelt does not understand the new generation of 
college students. They are pragmatists instead of sentimen- 
talists. 

The point of view of the typical American young man who is 
studying the arts and sciences in college to-day is approximately 
the laboratory point of view. The laboratory method is 
wrought through the habits of all of us. 

What need is there after all, when it has once been properly 
gone over, of fighting about the multiplication table? The 
typical pragmatical American mind, born as an experiment on 
an experimental continent and living by experiment, naturally 
assumes that matters of spiritual fact can be settled by experi- 
ment. The truth will be what works best in the long run. We 
will automatically agree sooner or later that two and two are 
^our. They either are four or they are not. 



MORE WAR-MOONING 3G 



00/ 



It is this almost daily habit of the typical pragmatical Ameri- 
can of settling things by experiment and not by force, which 
makes the American from the more aristocratic authoritative 
European point of view, when he is involved in a disagreement, 
an incredibly peaceful and almost insipid person. He has no 
force habits and is out of sympathy with force and force institu- 
tions to a degree for which older nations never allow and prob- 
ably never will, until we have expressed ourselves in our 
literature, or in our good-naturedly intrepid national will, or until 
we stand with them face to face. If there are people around us 
or in other nations, who want to make two and two equal five, or 
two and two equal three, we are unaccountably good-humoured 
about it; we do not deny their right to do it, but we take it for 
granted they will try to show they can do it by figuring and not 
by shooting. If they try to get their way by shooting, they 
are making a mistake so big and so fundamental that we know 
there must be other mistakes to go with it. If they try to get 
their way by shooting, we suspect they are wrong. If they 
succeed in getting their way by shooting, we know they are 
wrong. 

Force works backw^ard with an American boy. 

Shooting a truth — to an American, is a contradiction in terms. 
When he sees a truth is a truth that has to be shot at people he 
wonders what is the matter with it. 

Every American boy, as a matter of course, as a matter of 
climate, as a matter of big trees blue sky and a fresh soil, in- 
herently despises his father the moment his father orders him 
about. If the father uses force to compel what he believes, 
every iota of blood iron and sunshine in the boy automatically 
rebels. What his father believes is dropped and his father for 
all practical purposes of a father in American life is dropped 
with it. The boy may pick up the belief again later when it 
happens to be presented to him as a fellow human being — but 
the father is dropped forever. 

This is practically a new trait in the history of human nature. 



308 WE 

Individuals have always had it but presented in its completeness 
and unconsciousness, presented as by the whole broadside of 
our western world, it is a new fact of amazing and revolutionary 
intent, with which the nations of the older world are unfamiliar, 
which they do not understand, will not believe — with which 
they do not reckon — and which to deal with them successfully 
America has next to express. 

The moment America expresses this fact about American 
human nature — gives it the slightest adequate advertisement or 
expression to the older nations, they will use with us a totally 
different technique from the technique they employ with other 
nations. Everything they do, say, or get or try to get, will be 
based upon this revolutionary fact in human nature in our coun- 
try, namely: the fact that the typical American boy has never 
learned to take orders from anybody. It has never occurred 
to an American boy to obey a person. He only obeys facts 
behind persons, to which older persons call his attention. Only 
a fact ever has or ever can order an American about. The 
military bump, the bump of force-reverence, in an American 
boy apparently by his just being born and by his just breathing 
on this continent, is a hole. 

In the iVmerican people the world is confronted for the first 
time with a leading and masterful people with whom force has 
no significance whatever. Everything America has done (like 
the telegraph, aeroplane and phonogTaph) everything America 
has wrested out of the material world, until it has become the 
most magnificently material of all nations, has been through 
the spirit. We have conquered too much matter with our 
souls to be afraid of armies or to be impressed by a military 
tone, or to be overawed, in this place in the world we have 
hewed out for ourselves, by the military mannerisms of other 
nations, or by curious out-of-date threats, and Colonel Roose- 
velts' melodramatic gun-ultimatums. 

But it is not only this pragmatic or self -experimenting trait 
in the typical American that Colonel Roosevelt is going to find 



MORE WAR-MOONING 369 

running counter to his force-pliilosophy and military-training idea 
among young men. Tlie typical American young man has the 
doggedness as well as the independence that goes with the 
scientific mind. 

He cannot think of war as expressing himself. It is his giving 
up and saying he cannot express himself, that he has not the 
brains or the art. He looks upon fighting to get his way as a 
substitute for the grit to be understood, as a confession of the 
disgrace and the defeat of his own spirit, cowering before the 
enemy and slinking into murder. The college students in Amer- 
ica when an adequate program of national advertising and na- 
tional self-expressoin has been placed before the people are 
going to make good-natured allowances for the Colonel. They 
are going to see how he is made — how dumb he is — how ir- 
repressibly inexpressible. They are going to look upon him 
with a kind of pride as an admirable, manly, forgivable, 
nobly muddleheaded person. But that is as far as they will go. 
If in the end he does not come to terms with them and if he does 
not let them live out their natures in their generation as he has 
his in his, he will soon be known as the most Ex, Ex-President 
we have ever had. 



XXVII 
PEACE-DREAMING 

There have been several times in Mr. Bryan's history and in 
the history of the country when Mr. Bryan has seemed to the 
country a rhetorical and rather word-comfortable person. We 
often would have felt relieved if Mr. Bryan had been more 
thorough-minded, more worn and peaked-faced with thought. 

As Colonel Roosevelt is sentimental about war, Mr. Bryan 
is sentimental about peace. 

It was in 1896 that Mr. Bryan burst into glory all at once — 
in five minutes — grasped fame single-handed with one single 
mixed metaphor, and everything about Mr. Bryan has been 
more or less mixed ever since. It is partly because the mixture 
is highly charged, but still more because it is highly mixed, 
that Mr. Bryan has become a really powerful representative 
man and that dear muddleheaded millions all over the land 
have followed him and are still following him through thick 
and thin, through crosses and crowns and harps, to this 
day. 

Mr. Bryan represents, as it seems to me, a very real, very 
sincere, robust and alive peace without a technique. All men 
of special gifts have to have the defects of their qualities, and, 
as the poet loves to write poetry for its own sake, and the 
scientist loves science for its own sake (and even the flirt loves 
flirting for its own sake) , Mr. Bryan has been too satisfied with 
oratory. He has been too comfortable with his fine glowing 
audience-emotions to feel a personal need of finishing off his 
emotions into actions. 

It is because Mr. Bryan has not compelled himself to analyze 

370 



PEACE-DREAMING 371 

his emotions through into clear administrative ideas and pro- 
grams that he has never quite arrived and has been an Ahnost 
in America and a still Almost for twenty years. It is his in- 
ability to do this — this common inability of orators he shares 
with others — that has cast him up before the nation and left 
him high and dry in his own mixed but noble feelings over and 
over in his life. 

If Mr. Bryan would work out his technique to-morrow morn- 
ing, or if someone would supply him with a technique to-morrow 
morning, the upheaval of sheer American good-will in him would 
soon cover the earth. He stands for something real in our Amer- 
ican character and life which can be made catching in nations. 

The moment Mr. Bryan acquires or is presented with a 
program to back up his personality and the moment he uses 
the enormous spiritual real estate he has in this country, the 
corner lot of attention he has honestly acquired, to advertise a 
real program on, things will begin to happen. Mr. Bryan may 
have his faults of detail and of direction, but he has come to 
be to America^beating warmly under all our public life, a kind 
of national Solar Plexus. 

It would be foolish for a peace-movement to throw a Bryan 
away. The moment Mr. Bryan proceeds to cooperate with 
others — with men who have a technique of peace until people 
can see his peace-faith backed up by his peace-works, it would 
be hard to overestimate his value to the country. 

When a provincial and New Yorkish paper like the New 
York Sun thinks it can take a national asset of publicity, a 
magnificent nucleus of attention, a vast property of fame and 
self -revelation of half a nation, like William Jennings Bryan, 
and set him permanently one side, it betrays an ignorance of 
human nature and of American life and of what really counts 
in politics and in making things happen, that only a Sun that 
rises daily in Avenue A, gives one little feverish swing at the 
sky, quirks itself along a few streets over in New York and 
sets in Riverside Drive — would think of. 



372 WE 

If the American people understand Mr. Bryan as well as 
Mr. Wilson does, we will yet make great use of him in finding 
out and expressing the national will — what might be called the 
great vague ground-swell of public opinion in this country. 

The least that can be granted to Mr. Bryan's religion is that 
in spite of a certain vagueness and fumbliness and a lack of 
technique with which he uses it — it is really being used and is 
daily being put in a prominent place to use, as if he believed it. 
No religion a man is always running risks for can long be set 
one side. 

He is a uniquely representative type in our American life, 
one that America will yet be proud of and yet see the use of — 
before Mr. Bryan is dead. We would be proud now if it were 
not for a rather big, noble, good-hearted looseness in Mr. Bryan's 
mind, a failure, as it seems to me from the point of view of this 
book, to see — as I think I do — not merely that his religion can 
be made to work, but definitely and particularly and point by 
point how it can be made to work, and how everybody can be 
got to help make it work, as if it were just plain common sense, 
good business and not religion at all. 



Of course Mr. Bryan thinks he has a technique for his re- 
ligion in his treaties. But treaties unfortunately between na- 
tions are at best cold-blooded non-committal mutually wrung- 
out concessions and balanced compromises and do not and 
could not be made to express the more vital and personal quali- 
ties in Mr. Bryan's peace-religion. Treaties are professionally 
and even expertly ansemic academic and ineffectual expres- 
sions of a nation. Mr. Bryan's treaties are mere preventives 
and international anodynes at best, and they are not like Mr. 
Bryan, nor do they express Mr. Bryan, nor do. they express 
any other American that ever lived. My proposition, it seems 
to me — a positive, warm, glowed-through, mutually welcomed, 
mutually conducted campaign of mutual self-assertion and of 



PEACE-DREAMING 373 

mutual advertising, a tremendous international undertaking 
of touching the imagination and wills of nations with daily 
acts and words is practical because it is human, and because 
being human it makes people think of nations practically, as 
made up of human beings. And, of course, besides being in- 
effective because they are inexpressive, treaties are too cheap. 
They have no engine in them — no appropriation — no great paid 
army of salesmen of attention. They are and always have been 
and must be treated as mere scraps of paper, remote, specialized, 
legalized, sterilized organs of the public will because (more credit 
to all of us) they do not express or reveal the people that made 
them. Treaties express lawyers, and lawyers were not intended 
as everybody knows to express and to reveal people, least of all 
to reveal nations. Our treaties with other nations must be lived 
and lived out loud by all our people. They shall be written 
and shall be produced as plays and they shall be acted daily 
with markets, with banks, and with cities and nations in the 
cast, all under the direction of expert professional revealers — 
men with a technique in touching the imaginations and arous- 
ing the wills of men. 

I cannot help thinking what would be accomplished if Mr. 
Roosevelt and Mr. Bryan between them would take up and 
carry forward my proposition of advertising as a means of 
national self-defense. With President Wilson to oversee the 
field and select and throw in with them men to help them (types 
of men that they themselves could not get) , we would soon have 
the men of America of all types and temperaments and gifts 
speaking and acting together in a tremendous chorus and array 
of team-work, making America revealed and loved and feared 
throughout the world. 

A sketch of the details of this program is reserved for later 
chapters. 



XXVIII 
ADVERTISING 

When a man says: "There is such a thing as being too proud 
to fight," there is a standard emotion to have about the man. 
He is afraid probably, people think, and he is seeking refuge in 
the comfortable nobility and fine sound of a phrase. The 
English, French, and German peoples or governments and 
General Staffs of the world and many Americans quite naturally 
and automatically, when President Wilson uses an expression 
like this, drop into the standard emotion about it. The only 
way in which such an expression or any other expression that 
has a standard emotion that goes with it can be used without 
misfortune is by advertising who the man is who is saying it, 
what the man is like, what he means by it and what he has 
done and intends to do to show what he means by it. Every- 
thing turns on the proper advertising of the man. The remark 
and the man both can be annihilated by advertising him if he 
is a coward, and the man and the remark both can be made un- 
conquerable by advertising him if he is not. 

If America proposes to depart from the regular standard emo- 
tion about patriotism and self-defense, the only way she can 
be understood in doing it is to advertise what she is like and 
what she means. 

If America is going to defend herself with her people, she 
must advertise her people. If America proposes to strike out 
with an original idea of her own and says she believes she can 
fight better with advertisements than she can with guns, she 
must begin by advertising advertising. It is because the na- 
tions do not know what our people are like and do not know 

374 



ADVERTISING 375 

what our advertising is that they drop into the regular standard 
emotion about us when the President says: "There is such a 
thing as being too proud to fight." 

This is natural and fair enough^ What makes civilization 
civilization is that it has arranged certain standard interpreta- 
tions to go with certain standard experiences and actions. 

We all agree that there is a reason for standards. We have 
come to regard them as the short cuts and conveniences of the 
higher and fuller life. 

A man who goes through his house and puts all the hot-water 
faucets on the right instead of the left insults, ten hours a day, 
every man woman and child who comes into his house. He 
ought to be punished by having everybody stay away. 

It is agreed that a man ought to expect to be inconvenienced 
in trying to inconvenience and interrupt a planet. If one de- 
parts from standards without meaning, one must be prepared 
to suffer. If one departs from them with meaning, one must 
find some way of making the meaning known. If one is driv- 
ing an automobile that has suddenly taken a notion in its own 
independent insides that it will only allow itself to be turned out 
to the left, there are only two things one can do with the auto- 
mobile. One is to let the automobile turn off to the left of the 
road and stand in a yard at one side and stop being an auto- 
mobile, and the other, if it must go on, is to send three or four 
automobiles on ahead of it, advertising to every team for ten 
miles up the road that an automobile that can only turn out 
to the left is coming and for them please to be so good as to 
understand it and be ready for it and turn out to the left. 

As regards the paramount issue of the world to-day as to 
whether a nation shall defend itself by killing and by a system 
of threatening to kill or not, all the nations have established a 
standard of turning out to the left. If the United States pro- 
poses to turn out to the right, we must advertise. America 
has come to the point where she believes that there is nothing 
else to do on this subject but to turn out to the right, and she 



376 WE 

must make a stupendous persistent universal advertisement of 
what she means by it and of how she proposes to do it and invite 
other nations to agree to help her. Then, when President 
Wilson makes a remark saying there is such a thing as being 
too proud to fight, the nations will respect us, and understand 

us. 

The only way America can depart from a standard inter- 
pretation or a standard action and act with originality and 
freshness and power and take a new stand with national self- 
respect is to begin with national self -revelation. In other 
words, America can only be true to herself and fulfill her tem- 
perament and destiny and take her place among the nations by 
advertising among the nations her soul as she has advertised 
her motor cars, her pianolas, her harvesting machines, locomo- 
tives, aeroplanes, phonographs, telephones and moving pictures. 



Treaties like wills are written by lawyers in their most haught- 
ily sterilized state of mind. They are as inhuman, unhomelike, 
unrevealing and meaningless-looking as forts. They are pris- 
ons of words. The souls of nations look out from them through 
bars. Treaties "might be said to be almost visions of dogged, 
bottomless inexpressiveness. 

The carping criticism one often hears in the streets of the 
sayings of public men, the malicious part-quotation, the sus- 
picious interpretation in the newspapers which we find daily 
before our eyes cowing a certain type of politician into being a 
nobody, and which we all have seen ever since we can remember 
taking all boldness and power out of public speech and making 
men talk in a kind of terror-stricken literalness and dull emas- 
culated particularity like lawyers' briefs, is illustrated in the 
way lawyers think treaties must be written. 

It is because the typical lawyer in saying a thing, feels obliged 
to lumber up every sentence with ten fools he thinks might mis- 
understand it- that almost nothing the typical lawyer (until 



ADVERTISING 377 

he stops being a lawyer) can write either attracts or holds to- 
day the attention of the people. The typical legal-minded 
document edges along in a kind of St. Vitus dance of accuracy, 
paralyzing every adjective, verb and adverb with the fear that 
now some new kind of idiot may be born, and may grow up, 
and may read it. It is because legal documents are especially 
written with reference to idiots, with reference to every possible 
kind, born and unborn, in the same sentence that people do not 
understand them, do not read them and treat treaties as scraps 
of paper. 

If national papers and addresses that purport to speak for 
this nation to other nations were written as great human docu- 
ments, expert studies in the human values of words and the 
stresses of ideas; if they were written as master engineering 
feats in human emotions and wills and in opening up the minds 
and hearts of the people, Mr, Bryan's treaties would be effec- 
tive. 

In the meantime, as long as every known law of getting and 
holding the attention and gripping the loyalty and enthusiasm 
of human beings is defied by the typical legal document, I place 
no more faith in Mr. Bryan's treaties than Mr. Roosevelt does. 
Men who can turn around the daily habits of the lives of other 
men, empty their pocketbooks, make them give up their homes 
and buy automobiles with a half page of words in the back part 
of a magazine, represent the type of men to whom the fate of 
this nation should be entrusted when it expresses its soul, its 
will, its solemn and sacred hope and fear to the other nations 
of the earth. The Declaration of Independence was an ad- 
vertisement. 



XXIX 
ADVERTISING ADVERTISING 

The President's attempt to defend the rights of Americans and 
of neutrals, in some other way than force or flourishing our navy 
and army in the eyes of the German people, brought forth this 
remark from a Western newspaper : 

"We may talk and write notes until doomsday, but if we fail 
to advance our case in some material way, Germany has us on the 
run/' 

I agree to this statement. My only difference with Colonel 
Roosevelt's attitude toward it is that I have a technique and a 
program for advancing our case in a material way without 
using physical force and that he has not. 

I am not proposing to defend this nation by aiming at hostile 
nations a philosophy or a line of reasoning, by teasing people not 
to fight or by preaching beautiful peaceful sentiments — a form of 
self-defense in which I have no more faith, probably not as much, 
as Colonel Roosevelt. It is the self -revelation of the material 
mastery and business power, the personal ascendency in modern 
life of peaceful men. 

It is an imperious peace that I announce, as getting ready 
to-day in our American life, to be hurled upon the world. 

The same militant attitude Theodore Roosevelt has with 
guns, I have with ideas. 

He insists on being armed with powder. 

I insist upon advertising. 

My ideas are armed ideas. 

Colonel Roosevelt's ideas are not. He is unarmed with ideas 
and feels unarmed and scared with them, because he cannot ex- 

378 



ADVERTISING ADVERTISING 379 

press them. When an idea is expressed it becomes a material 
force. It takes a material form because it makes people in- 
stantly see and do material things. This makes an expressed 
idea an armed idea. 

I have no more faith in unarmed ideas than Colonel Roosevelt. 

All we have to do — Colonel Roosevelt and I — to act together, 
is to arm our ideas. 

When we have a big national bureau of men at work all arm- 
ing our ideas, Colonel Roosevelt will trust ideas as much as I 
do. 

If Colonel Roosevelt could express or see others expressing 
before his eyes all the great peaceful moral ideas he is now stamp 
ing his feet to express, that he is now daily heaping up fighting 
and platitudinosity on, he would be a peaceful man to-morrow \ 
This next section deals with men who can express Colonel 
Roosevelt's ideas of the true and the beautiful and the good so 
that Colonel Roosevelt will not need any longer to fight or be 
threaty-minded or buUy-witted about the True the Beautiful 
and the Good. 

In its spirit, in its implacableness, its faith in itself, its fun- 
damental emotion, the courage of these men is in no sense dif- 
ferent from Colonel Roosevelt's in that great scene at Chicago, 
which all America will yet be proud of, when he crashed down 
the wood and plaster gods of all parties, the world looking 
on, made politics suddenly a man's pastime, a noble, creative 
calling, a career into which real American men with real Amer- 
ican courage, sincerity, unconventionality and vim would be 
eager to go, and into which they have been going ever since. 

I invoke Colonel Roosevelt's spirit at Chicago as the spirit 
of the kind of peace with which I propose and with which I 
announce America shall be defended. 

This statement is backed up by as definite a program as one 
would undertake with dreadnoughts and with Rough Riders, 
by a definite, progressive, massive, national technique in touch- 
ing the imaginations and the wills of men. 



380 WE 

The main difference between Colonel Roosevelt's position 
and mine is that I have been a little quicker than Mr. Roosevelt 
to discover advertising as the defense of a nation, to work out 
a technique of advertising a nation through its business men as 
a substitute for advertising a nation with an army and navy, and 
that I have managed in this way to give up exploding and shoot- 
ing the country into people's minds a little sooner than Mr. 
Roosevelt has. And I believe that Mr. Roosevelt is going to 
give it up, too, the moment he stops to notice the technique of 
peace the country is already acquiring and is already daily using 
under his eyes. 



LOOK ra 

DRAMATIZING BUSINESS 

I 

JOHN BRO\^Nr SMITH TRIES 

WISi ARE all agreed that preaching about peace does 
not seem to advertise it as it should. 
We all want to do something to stop preaching 
about peace. 

We have about come to the conclusion that the only way to 
stop preaching about peace is to dramatize it. A soldier is a 
soldier because he does not see dramatically. Every personal 
quarrel or violation of peace between men is based on the failure 
of the men to dramatize what they are trying to say to us so 
that no one can help seeing it. 

The other day I found myself in front of a train gate in Pitts- 
burgh in a big bottle-shaped crowd. It was the last minute 
before train time and as I looked up ahead, up at the neck of the 
bottle, I could see by craning my neck a little, the people drib- 
bling through and two men punching tickets. I was walking 
along myself at the rate of about three inches a minute — at least 
it felt like that — and as the three inches I was using seemed to 
be wanted very much by the people just behind me, I gave way 
once or twice. Then I thought I might as well take my turn, 
and hold on to my own three inches, and proceeded to do so. 

The friend I was with and with whom I was going out to^ 
spend the night, and with whom I was talking over my shoulder 
just behind me, seemed strangely silent, and when I looked 

381 



382 WE 

around to see why he didn't talk back, I found he wasn't there, 
that he had dropped behind. Finally, way down at the tip 
of the tail of the crowd with every man, woman and child 
going around him and getting in ahead of him, I saw him. 
When he came up I didn't say anytliing about it, neither did 
he. He was the operating vice-president of the Pennsylvania 
System west of Pittsburgh. One has one's guests, of course, 
get into one's carriage first. 

One always thinks of men with pompous and important 
words like "president" rolling along in front of their names, as 
living in a kind of glut of private cars and special privileges and 
express trains held up on sidings to let them go by. Many and 
many a time when my train has been held up way out by a tiu*nip 
field somewhere or a huckleberry pasture, I have sat in that 
dead helpless silence and waited and said to myself that it was 
some railroad president probably we had to let go by. 

And now here is John Brown Smith! (He would not want 
me to call him by his real name out loud in this way to every- 
body going along in a book.) And when he came up, as I 
said before, I did not say anything: I walked on and thought. 
I wish people knew him ; I wish I could have held up that crowd 
at the gate a second; I would have said: "Ladies and gentlemen, 
please look behind you a minute; that man way back there in 
the crowd, with the short-clipped moustache, who has kept 
standing one side and who has let you and me and the rest of 
us all get in ahead of him, is John Brown Smith, the operating 
vice-president of this road. You might take a good look at 
him ; he is what the Pennsylvania Railroad is trying to be like — 
modest, helpful as you see — kind of snooping around the public 
with kindness. I am not saying that he is exactly a small work- 
ing model of the Pennsylvania Railroad System in action, but 
I do think that John Smith is acting the way the Pennsylvania 
Railroad feels, and that the Pennsylvania Railroad is trying 
hard all day to work itself over into a kind of colossal John 
Smith as fast as it can." 



JOHN BROWN SMITH TRIES 383 

Perhaps it would not be a bad idea for the pubUc to stop be- 
ing offish for a httle while now with the Pennsylvania and see 
how much like John Smith it can get. 

The main trouble with the railroads to-day is that they can- 
not talk. They are having every other day during the last few 
years, new ideas and new feelings about themselves and about 
people that they cannot express. For the last thirty years or 
so almost nothing that a railroad could do or say that would 
make an unsuspicious and generous people unreasonable about 
railroads and ugly and discouraged, has been overlooked. The 
crisis that the railroads find themselves up against now is the fact 
that the best of them have changed their minds. Now how can 
they express their new minds as well as they have expressed 
their old ones? 

I wish the whole United States had been piling in and trying 
to get on that train through that gate the other day, and I 
wish Mr. Brandeis had been there, or Mr. Folk or Mr. Mellen 
and Mr. Gompers or our friend Mr. Debs. As I see it, the 
Pennsylvania was expressing itself very well, and I want to 
say that if the Pennsylvania Railroad could succeed in express- 
ing itself to the public at large as it expressed itself to me, all 
of its difficulties would be over. 

The idea it was expressing was somewhat revolutionary for 
a railroad — a new idea. It is always hard for anybody to ex- 
press a new idea, and when I see anybody — especially a railroad — 
having a new idea and trying to express it, I want to help. I 
heard the spirit of the Pennsylvania Railroad in the Pittsburgh 
Station the other day whispering absentmindedly to itself 
(through John Brown Smith) ; and as I just happened to be by I 
report it to the country. It may seem a little one-sided thing 
in a way, and nothing remarkable about it, but it has in it, it 
seems to me, the fate of this nation, the fate of industry and 
religion in modern life, of war and of peace, and the integrity 
and dignity of the life of our people. 

Is there any way in which it could be arranged so that a 



384 WE 

whole country could be made to stand by and see what I saw — • 
a great railroad dramatized — the soul of a great railroad caught 
up in a minute and acted out before my eyes in a little play? 

I do not think it would be difficult. Everything about a 
railroad, when one thinks of it, is like a play. And the play 
never ceases day or night. 

What John Brown Smith said to me about his railroad the 
other day could be said to everybody by the whole railroad for 
seven thousand miles all day and all night and said over and 
over every new twenty-four hours in the year. 

It is a matter of having John Brown Smith pick out enough 
other John Brown Smiths, put them under him to express him 
and multiply him, until there are seven thousand miles of him. 
It is then a matter of arranging the machinery of the Penn- 
sylvania System as a piece of mechanism so that it will be rolling 
round and round every day expressing and bringing out John 
Brown Smiths instead of suppressing them, making them mean- 
ingless, making them seem like flies on steel wheels or robins in 
a boiler factory. 

The business of conducting efficiently a great business like 
a railroad is essentially a dramatic business, a study of the 
dramatic possibilities of a big people-moving machine, as a 
curious, wonderful mechanism for impressing the imaginations 
of people, for expressing the sins, the high desires, the wills, 
the hopes, the services of the men the railroad is about, to vast 
trainloads of people — millions of people a day — listening and 
rolling and listening day and night ! 



II 

JOHN BROWN SMITH'S PLAY 

All business is a great, serious, sincere study in dramatizing 
ideas, a profound art of giving precise and powerful expression 
to the needs, motives and desires and powers of the men who 
conduct the business. Every business is concerned in express- 
ing to and expressing for a vast audience of customers to whom 
the business is addressed. 

The audience or the people in the play are more in evidence 
perhaps in railroads and department stores than in some other 
forms of business, but the principle is the same. 

Every business is addressed to an audience. 

The Pennsylvania Railroad as a business has at least two 
large audiences — one of two hundred and fifty thousand em- 
ployees and the other of millions of people grouped in two thou- 
sand towns and cities to which it is addressing itself every minute 
every day. Another of its audiences, of course, is a very small 
and sensitive one made up of banks and of brokers from whom it 
borrows money. 

Each of these audiences from a dramatic point of view has to 
be studied and addressed accordingly, through the way the 
railroad runs itself, and as each of these audiences is very 
much mixed up with most of the others and as each au- 
dience sees what the railroad is whispering to the others, 
the far-sighted railroad soon learns if it is to keep its hold, it 
must be candid and straight with them all, from one end to 
the other. 

The Pennsylvania dramatic problem as regards its train 
audiences is a problem of how to dramatize John Smith to the 

385 



386 WE 

employees of the road so that they will redramatize him to tlie 
people in the trains, so that every employee on the road^all 
brakemen, conductors, and ticket agents, will be busy redramatiz- 
ing John Smith to the people in the trains. John Smith's soul, 
if I may say so, must be dramatized, must be acted with a full 
caste in repertory, by every freight handler, passenger-coach, 
Bessemer steel rail, switch, signal box, whistle and bell, en- 
gineer and brakeman, gateman and window washer on the 
Pennsylvania system. The shine on the windows, the polite- 
ness with the ticket, shall all radiate John Smith, and this 
achievement shall be a personal feat, a feat of team-work of 
personalities, a feat of human radiation, human revelation, and 
human emphasis, until the Pennsylvania Railroad shall be 
seen as it is, as a vivid moving picture, as a panorama of human 
emotions and human wills all working softly together, flashing 
back and forth all day, all night, from New York to Pittsburgh 
and from Cincinnati, St. Louis, to Chicago. 

It is because the railroads have for many years been in the 
hands of men who did not see the railroad as a dramatic propo- 
sition at all, that so many of the railroads have fallen into dis- 
grace with the banks. 

The main business difficulty our railroads are facing to-day is 
that they have many feelings toward the public and toward their 
work and toward their employees and toward the banks that 
they cannot get the banks to believe. The banks would let 
them have money if they could think up the actions and words 
that would make the banks believe in them. The banks stand 
around coldly and look on and will not let them have the money. 
If a railroad cannot get even its own employees to believe in it, 
banks do not see why they should, and if the very people who 
live on a railroad, the people who are being pulled around every 
day in its trains do not believe in it, if the people just sit in their 
seats mile after mile talking against it, if all the passengers on the 
road become a kind of huge rolling advertisement of what the 
road is like, which the road is hauling around against itself, why. 



JOHN BROWN SMITH'S PLAY 387 

of course, none of its audiences believes in it, and nothing can be 
accomplished. 

If the modern public-service business man of the arriving sort 
has a new spirit toward the public, his business problem is a 
dramatic one, a problem of getting the attention of the public 
through action, not to what he used to be like, but to what he is 
like now, and to what he is believing and doing and trying to do 
now. 

It is not a new thing in business, its thus becoming dramatic. 

It has always been dramatic without knowing it. It is be- 
cause business has been dramatic so successfully and has so 
masterfully and crushingly expressed its ideas the last forty 
years that people have found out what those ideas are and that 
the world is now proceeding to have its better, more capable, 
and far-reaching business men express better, nobler, and more 
far-reaching ideas. 

All one has to do is to stop to think how dramatic grade cross- 
ings have been to begin to imagine what could be done by a rail- 
road in dramatizing to travellers on the road other ideas besides 
danger, as well as they have already dramatized danger, death, 
stock-watering, legislature-doping and " public-be-damned " 
presidents. 

It is not the way Mr. Vanderbilt said "The Public Be 
Damned'" to the people; it was the way he made his road say 
damn for him, made his road calmly and regularly damn them; it 
was the way he took his damn up honestly, seriously, and in de- 
tail, dramatized his Damn in great sweeps, hundreds of miles at 
a time, station by station, which made people first understand 
about railroads. 

It was because the ideas the railroads had of themselves were 
dramatized so well that the people have determined now that the 
railroads must have different ones. 

So have the railroads. 



Ill 

THE NATION'S PLAY 

When a Trust does wrong, it does it by being impersonal and 
depersonalizing everybody it touches. A nation or a railroad 
that does wrong usually does it in the same way. Germany is 
doing wrong to-day because for the moment under its present in- 
fluences it has fallen into dealing with truths and with men as 
machines. 

Machinery seems to have been accepted by many people as an 
arrangement for not being obliged to have any interest in people 
at all. Man invented machinery at first so that he could get 
away from always having to bother about people, so that his 
mind would be free for other things. Machinery has been made 
for forty years a huge, transcendent drama of man's absent- 
mindedness. In the first stage of machinery civilization could 
not but overemphasize in all nations the indifferent and mechan- 
ical side of men. But while machinery during all these years has 
been pulling us in one direction because it is mechanical, business 
has been pulling us in the other because it is an art. Business, 
being dependent on making people want things, has been work- 
ing against mechanizing tendencies of modern life even while it 
was using machinery for its ends. In proportion as men have 
succeeded in the last few years, they have succeeded through the 
art of discovering and creating and making permanent men's 
mutual interests. They have seen that the quintessence of a 
great successful business lies in saying "We." They have seen 
that the quintessence of machinery is to remove or ignore people 
and crush personality and to deal with people as if it were think- 
ing of them all the while as "They" and "It." The issue has 

388 



THE NATION'S PLAY 389 

been sharply defined for the last fifteen years, the mechanic on 
the one hand and the artist on the other, struggling for control of 
modern industry. We are very familiar with the differences be- 
tween the mechanic and the artist, between the mechanical- 
minded view of things and the artist's view. Art is an invention 
for loving one's work and for making other people love it so that 
the more an artist works and the more he lavishes his own per- 
sonality in his work and expresses in it the essence of himself, the 
happier he is and the more his work succeeds with others. Over 
against this we have watched the mechanic at work on the stuff 
of civilization. We have watched him thrusting the machine be- 
fore us everywhere as an invention for not loving one's work or 
not having to, as an invention for getting out of work and getting 
away from self-expression, an invention for being somebody else 
and for being in some other place. He has made machinery the 
huge, numb, neuter drama of indifference. This was the inevi- 
table first stage of machinery. 

In the second stage, where the world and the Pennsylvania 
Railroad are finding themselves now, we are waking up to the 
idea that human machinery in distinction from iron machinery 
is efficient in proportion as we make it an organic part of the 
machine to let all the people in the machine be human in it. We 
recognize that a machine like a department store in proportion as 
it expresses human emotions and is dramatic with the people in 
it, crowds its store with people and drives mechanical competi- 
tors out of business. 

In proportion as all machinery with people in it is being per- 
sonalized and humanized, the machinery becomes competent 
and efficient beyond all competition. We are brought front to 
front on every hand with the revolutionary fact that all this vast 
heap of social and industrial machinery around us in modern life 
instead of being ruled by mechanical-minded men is being ruled 
by artists. If machinery and business are to be run together at 
all in America, the artists in business must control the machines. 
We have seen day after day the world all about us being handed 



390 WE 

over to artists, and every thing that happens in it is being made to 
happen by artists. Everything that happens is made to happen 
by men who can get the attention of the people they want the 
things to happen to or happen with. The only way a man can 
get attention is through self-expression culminating in mutual 
self-expression, in expressing one's self and others together, which 
is what John Brown Smith is doing with his railroad. Running 
a railroad in 1916 is an art, and all business men, in proportion as 
they succeed, are trying to be artists. All business is becoming 
before our eyes an art-form. Some men about us are expressing 
their worst selves in it and some their best ones in it. Others tell 
us that they are not expressing themselves in their business, 
which Society is beginning to see is the most degrading and 
dangerous self-expression of all. We are already looking upon 
men as partners in guilt if they let their machines run over 
their souls. It is partly a self-expression in a man to let a 
machine run over his soul. If one lets the machine run over 
one's soul, that is the kind of a soul one has. One can at least 
die. 

At least this is the way people have come to feel about it, and 
this is the reason we are greeting men with a genius like Henrj^ 
Ford's — a genius for making machines human — as the deter- 
mining men of modern life. The men who are smashing 
out places in this great machine for people to express them- 
selves, who are giving the people a chance to create machines 
in which it will be the whole idea of the machines that they 
are to be expressed, are having the world shoved into their 
hands. 

The people have decided to be parts of We-Machines. We 
have been cogs in other people's I-Machines long enough. 

Since I have seen that the first condition of success in getting 
attention to-day is the gift to say "You and I" or "We," I have 
no longer been afraid of the kind of men who are bound to control 
America at home and express America abroad during the years 
ahead of us. But we are in a transition state and I would like to 



THE NATION'S PLAY 391 

show in the next two or three chapters how this process is going 
on and how vivid and dramatic American business already is and 
how America can be seen before our eyes on every hand sorting 
its business men out, determining who shall defend it and ex- 
press it, and who shall not. 



IV 

THE CASTE OF THE NATION'S PLAY 

I have taken the position that America is going to defend her- 
self from other countries by advertising American men through 
American goods, by inserting a widespread, innumerable adver- 
tisement of America in every nation, by showing in every farm 
and field, every kitchen and village, and in every city of the 
world, through the way America does business and through her 
business men, what Americans are like. 

The Army and Navy bill each nation has to foot at the end of 
the year is its annual suspicion bill toward the people in other 
countries. This has a bearing on something that each of us can 
do. 

If iVmerica is to be defended by advertising through its busi- 
ness men what x'Vmericans are like, it is a matter of personal and 
immediate concern to all of us what kind of an advertisement of 
the American character the American business man to-day, from 
day to day, is putting out. 

The size of our army and navy in America is going to be de- 
termined by the way he buys and sells goods and makes people 
trust or distrust American promises and American character in 
all the countries, markets, houses, shops, and streets in the world. 
We are watching the American business man very closely. We 
want to feel that we know him. 

Judging from the revelation of what we are like which the 
American business man is now making abroad, how large an 
army and navy will we have to have, and how large a bill will 
we have to pay each year to keep people who see through us and 
who would like to shoot us, from shooting? 

392 



THE CASTE OF THE NATION'S PLAY 393 

At bottom the people who cry for a large army, cry for it be- 
cause (whether they know it or not) they do not trust the Amer- 
ican business man's dramatization of the American character 
which he is now making throughout the world. 

It might be to the point to look into this for a little and see for 
ourselves. 

My own observation (like anyone's, I suppose) is that Ameri- 
can business men are not all alike. Some of them expose the 
country to suspicion and attack by the way they make America 
look. Others defend it. 

The best line of defense for the people of a country to take 
would seem to be to expose the business men who expose it, de- 
fine them, pick them out in public, name them, see through them, 
and drive them out of business. 

There seems to be a certain quality in American human 
nature which these men dramatize in other nations, and repre- 
sent America as having, which makes people of other nations 
distrust it and have armies and navies ready for it. 

What is this quality in us? If we really have it we might as 
well face it and see through it. All we have to do is to face it and 
see through it and it will stop. The way to do this is not through 
legislation but through appropriations for making people see 
things, a national advertising campaign conducted partly by the 
government and partly by business men of engineering the at- 
tention of the people to news they really want to know and can 
daily use in dealing with American business men. If we can 
keep certain types of xVmerican business men from cheating us — 
by seeing through them ourselves at home — they will soon not 
be allowed to make money enough or get start enough in our 
own nation to have a chance to cheat the others. 

It is a little diflficult for a whole nation to see how it looks and 
then act as one man on what it sees, but as it is the only way to 
defend the nation and to remove the cause of offense and the 
danger of attack, we will have to question ourselves closely, 
establish and keep up a national searching of the heart. 



394 WE 

What we want to know about ourselves is: 

Is the American business man reveaUng liimself as a straight- 
forward, self-respecting person any man in any nation would 
want to deal with over and over again, a person anyone would 
know would never take advantage of him, or is he always do- 
ing things to us and saying things to us which show him after- 
ward as a shifty person who makes us, every time we think of 
him, wonder why we ever trust anybody? 

I have been, during the past few days taking a look at Ameri- 
can business men through the elegant wide front doors, the sleek 
and splendid plate-glass show windows they put in at the back 
of the great magazines. 

There are two spirits one seems to come upon in the Ameri- 
can business character in these show windows. One can take 
up almost any magazine, turn over the pages and find both of 
these spirits in a minute. Everj'body feels them and knows 
them. I might best try to express them perhaps by speaking 
for myself and by saying what these spirits make happen to 
me and to my pocketbook and to my soul when I come on them 
in the advertising pages of a magazine. It is not unimportant 
perhaps what these two spirits make happen to me. 

The things that these two spirits in business make me say 
and do they make nations say and do. They make nations 
trust each other and they make nations feel that as a matter of 
course they must be on their guard, and that they must have 
armies and navies to threaten us with if at any time they find 
us trying to take advantage of them in the way they see us 
taking advantage of one another. 



V 
ONE SCENE 

I have just been looking at a picture of some two hundred 
pigmies standing around in various attitudes of humble, hope- 
ful service to the average reader of Collier's Weekly. On closer 
examination I see that these pigmies are Bach, Beethoven, and 
Melba, and Calve, Campanini, emperors of music, kings and 
queens of song, and that they are all being pictured, as it were, 
blacking the musical shoes of the average subscriber of Collier's 
Weekly (five cents a week). One sees the Subscriber Himself 
pictured of heroic size, a kind of god in evening dress, a huge, 
beautiful Colossus in an easy chair with Mrs. Colossus sitting 
by him, and they are both listening with what seems to be a 
degree of royal hauteur to the composers and immortals of all 
ages assembled submissively below them by the Com- 
pany, of New York. 

A man in a barber shop leaning back having his face scraped 
softly and luxuriously by one fellow human being, and laying 
out his finger-nails to be pared by another fellow human being, 
and stretching out his beautiful feet upon the mountains (or 
rather on the foot-rest) to another fellow human being to have 
them made as elegant and polished as he is, could not look more 
important, more waited on, and more cherished and rated at 
his true worth by a devoted world than does this supposed, 
typical, average subscriber of Collier's Weekly, five cents a week, 

for whom the great Company in the greatness of its 

heart has gathered together the great ones of all the earth and 
made them the valets of his soul — that is, or rather of both Mr. 
and Mrs. Colossus's souls. The wonder and greatness of the 

395 



396 WE 

ages are pictured out as all pumping away for dear life for 
Mr. Colossus, and as keeping right on being beautiful and won- 
derful and immortal for him, while he dreams of profits between 
puffs of his cigar, or Mrs. Colossus broods over a new hat. To 
these are laid down the wonders of the world. 

I do not know how this advertisement as a revelation of 
what American customers are supposed to be like, and of what 
the iVmerican business man is like while selling to them, strikes 
other people as a national revelation we can afford to have 
around or not. But if I were a Japanese and had been sent over 
here to see how large an army and navy my government would 
have to raise to be safe in having dealings with Americans as 
customers, I should write home and recommend a triple-sized 
na\'y for Japan, always maneuvering and ready while trading 
with America, up and down the Pacific Coast. 

This advertisement makes six points in its exposure of what 
the Company thinks Americans are like. 

First. It deliberately and at great expense calls Mr. and Mrs. 
Colossus fools. 

Second. It thinks they will like it and will gladly pay out two 
hundred and fifty dollars for having been called fools to begin 
with, and for being fools afterward with all the conveniences. 

Third. The company laughs in its sleeve. It knows as any 
one does that this picture is a monstrous caricature of American 
life. It does not believe its picture itself. It merely thinks 
it will sell an instrument and wants to sell one by using the 
picture whether it respects it or believes it or not. 

Fourth. The company knows as well as anyone that music 
is in the heart. The company knows that either a Mr. and Mrs. 
Colossus like this do not exist, or that if they do exist, they are 
not happy and could not be happy. And the company pre- 
tends they are, and tries to get them to buy a machine and to 
keep on pretending they are. 

Fifth. The company knows that if Mr. and Mrs. Colossus 
buy the instrument that goes with the picture with any idea 



ONE SCENE 397 

that it is a true picture of the way Beethoven and Schumann 
and Caruso and Melba feel about them, about Mr. and Mrs. 
Colossus, it will be because the company has lied about the 
way Beethoven or Schumann feel about them. The company 
knows that if Beethoven could see Mr. Colossus or Mrs. Co- 
lossus one minute and could have foreseen that a great, beautiful 
Trust in America would ever fool or try to fool people into 
listening to his music like this, he would never have written 
another note. 

One hesitates to think what Gibbon, if he were looking over 
documents of American life to picture it to posterity and got 
hold of this advertisement (this exhibit A of an American hol- 
low home), would do with it, or Goethe, or Cervantes, or Ari- 
stophanes. 

From the pomt of view of the solidity and sincerity of the Ger- 
man view of life, an American Hollow Home like this flaunted 
around Europe would make it go hard between the Germans and 
us when any disagreement came up. It would be hard for 
Germans to understand us or expect to be understood by us, 
as a substitute for fighting us, with this picture of an American 
hollow home. 

People of other nations will do some thinking, too. 

*'If Americans will try to fool one another before everybody's 
eyes right at home like this," the Japanese will say, "what will 
they not try to do to fool us.^ " 

Two spirits — the first person singular spirit and first person 
plural spirit — in American business to-day are putting them- 
selves up before the nations of the world and saying, "The 
American People are like us." 



What a business man is really doing all the while when he is 
selling goods is dramatizing his idea of human nature. He is 
dramatizing in every word or movement of his sale his trust or 
his distrust of other people and his idea of himself. 



398 WE 

I have often thought that if people only knew how they looked 
while they were selling things, if they only knew how minute by 
minute they were giving themselves away for thirty cents, 
thirty dollars, three hundred dollars, or three thousand dollars, 
they would go out of business. 

Many and many a time when I do not let a man have my 
money, my ten dollars, perhaps, which he wants, I would pay it 
over to him gladly, give it to him outright — my ten dollars — if I 
could only get him to put it into ten dollars' worth of seeing 
how he looked while he was tr^ang to make my ten dollars his 
instead of letting it be mine. 

Or a dollar and a half would do as well. 

What some men will look like for a dollar and a half I would 
not look like for fifteen thousand dollars, and I would not feel 
like for fifteen million dollars. 

Each nation is going to pay the bill for removing from itself 
the causes that make necessary a world police and that make 
necessary large armies and navies among its neighbours. To de- 
fend America from other nations we will strip, expose, and crowd 
out of business the men who make men distrust Americans at 
home. 



VI 

SORTING OUT THE CASTE 

If America feels obliged to burden itself with a huge army and 
navy because it is afraid Germany or Japan almost any day may 
descend upon it and attack it, the more sensible and economical 
course to take would seem to be for America to say to Germany 
and say to Japan: "You see not all Americans are alike. There 
are some Americans you are daily dealing with in business who 
take advantage of you and that you cannot trust. We feel as 
you do that if America is really a nation of men like this, you will 
have to have a large army and navy to protect yourself in a crisis 
in dealing with us by using or threatening to use force. There 
are millions of other Americans who are not like these men, who 
deal with one another and deal with you as they would wish 
twenty years afterward to be dealt with themselves, men who 
say *We' as a matter of business if not as a matter of self- 
expression. 

" The millions of Americans who say * We ' and mean * We ' and 
who can carry the *We' out are the men who are running this 
country. We propose to proceed to prove it.'* 

America will then propose to Japan and to Germany to sort all 
the Americans out that make Japan and Germany feel that 
Americans cannot be trusted and that are making all of us — 
making Japan, Germany and America all combined — have to 
spend incalculable sums every year in not trusting each other. 
The American people will then proceed on a national campaign of 
their own and begin setting off to one side in business all American 
business men who expose America to other nations or who expose 
other nations to us. We will make it impossible for men like 

399 



400 WE 

these to do business in this country, by seeing through them and 
paying to make other people see through them until everybody 
leaves them alone. 

This is a national process we are going through with for our 
own sakes and that we are going through with anyway and we 
will tell Japan and Germany that if they will wait a little and stand 
by a little longer while we do it neither their armies nor ours will 
be necessary. The money we would otherwise spend on an 
army and navy appropriation and on bullying and being ready 
to bully, we will spend in sorting America out, in making Amer- 
ica so masterfully see through itself that other nations with 
armies and navies to help them will not feel that any minute they 
will be obliged to attend to it. 

We will see through ourselves so much better than other 
nations could make us, that they will have nothing to do. 

The men who in dealing with Japanese and Germans make the 
Japanese and Germans feel cheated are all cheating us. We are 
going to be obliged to get rid of them if only for our own sakes, 
and we will give Japan and Germany a showing of how we are 
going to do it. Then we will tell them that the money they 
would spend every year in not trusting us can be saved, and 
that the money we had been proposing to spend every year in 
not trusting them is every cent and twice as much more to be 
spent every year in advertising a way and sorting out and strip- 
ping off our rascals in America so that nobody will do business 
with them. By the time America gets through with the 
American business man who will not say "We" there will not be 
enough of him left for Japan or Germany to hear of, or be afraid 
of, or to make Japan or Germany afraid of us. 

America is a country as rich in humour as it is in coal and in 
iron and it is not afraid to spend vast sums of money every year 
in seeing through itself. America proposes to get rich out of 
seeing through itself. It proposes to be internationally pro- 
tected by it. 

America is going to dramatize daily in its own business with 



SORTING OUT THE CASTE 401 

its own people as well as with the people of other nations, the 
idea that it is a nation that sees through itself and in which no 
rascal can succeed in business. 

Every American citizen is to be a detective in the self-defense 
of his country up and down the streets as he buys and sells. We 
are all seeing with incredible rapidity and recognizing with in- 
credible rapidity two spirits in Americans and in American busi- 
ness life, the spirit of making a fool of a man to sell him some- 
thing, the spirit of selling goods to people whatever becomes of 
the people, on the one hand, and the spirit of saying and feeling 
*'We" with a customer and of establishing a permanent personal 
relation with his life and selling him things as a part of this 
permanent relation with his life, we are seeing on the other. We 
are all seeing it about us every day. And we are picking out 
the men we trade with accordingly. 

This policy America is entering upon will be not only in its 
self-defense, but by its proved success as self-defense will be de- 
liberately carried out as America's contribution to the peace 
problem of the world. America will say to the world: "We are 
a plain business nation. You can trust us because we know a 
good bargain when we see it. The only bargain we have come to 
recognize in this country as a good bargain, or as good business 
for us, is one in which each side is shrewd enough to look out for 
the interests of the other and in which each side sees to it that 
the other will be glad too, and will keep returning for more bar- 
gains afterward. 

"In one kind of business we have in America we find that the 
thing that is emphasized in a bargain is the men in it and the 
mutual, progressive, culminating, permanent, personal interests 
of the men. In the other kind sales are put first and men take 
their chances. We know which kind pays us best in dealing with 
one another and we know which will pay us best in dealing with 
you. Look over iYmerica and see if this is not true about us. 
Examine the men we have sorted out to trade with, the men we 
make successful in this country. The business men who say 



402 WE 

'We' and mean *We' when they advertise succeed in America, 
and the men who say * We ' but who at heart treat the customers 
as 'They* or as *It' — especially as *It' — go under." 

This is a rather long speech perhaps for a nation. I am not 
in favour as a rule of having a nation make long speeches, or of a 
nation's trying to explain an idea. It is the way America dram- 
atizes and is proceeding to dramatize this idea which counts. 

In the meantime, if America is going to adopt a definite policy 
of employing a substitute for an army and navy, it seems to be 
necessary if possible for her to say what she is driving at herself, 
or have some man in a book (the book to be adopted or rejected 
by a rising vote) say for her just what that policy is. A clear 
statement of what the policy is will help other nations to under- 
stand our neutrality not as an evasion or weakness, but as a sub- 
lime self-assertion of America's determination to take and keep 
her place among the nations by doing something of her own which 
she knows how to do and which it is like her to do, and not just 
something that other nations do because they cannot help it. 
America can help it. We are a business nation. 

We see that the business man who makes men chronically dis- 
trust men betrays and exposes a nation. He iz daily exposing 
our nation. We admit this, but we say he is not like us and that 
to-morrow he will not be heard of. 

If all wars are started and all wars are fought by men who in 
stead of thinking of people they deal with as You and I, as We — 
think of them as "foreigners" or as different from themselves, 
and deal with them as They and It — the way for America to de- 
fend herself is to have all her people a people who are notable for 
saying "We." 

We have noticed that it is only when people find out that we 
are dealing with them without noticing that they are people, 
that they fight, or that they pile up dreadnoughts, stand on tip- 
toe over dreadnoughts, and peep over at us, trade with one hand 
with us. . . . W^e do not want to be traded with with one 
hand. 



SORTING OUT THE CASTE 403 

We are not against any nation, but we are against all men in 
our own nation and all nations who trade with one hand. 

If the hundreds of thousands of mothers who are shedding 
tears to-day for their dead sons at the feet of emperors and of 
war ministers would cry at the feet of smug business men who are 
making people afraid of human nature, who daily in everything 
they do and buy and sell, are making people afraid of men they 
do not know, their tears would be more to the point. 

When a woman has lost three sons in a war and wants to cry 
at the right place, let her go to her own grocer, or to her banker 
or her broker possibly or to any man on God's earth who makes 
a little money for a few days out of breaking down the credit of 
the human heart forever. 

We fight and have wars and armaments because nobody can 
quite believe that anybody will do what he says. 

We may be deceived of course, and it may not be true, but 
it is always looking true or looking true enough to keep the 
people crushed with armaments, to make the people — especially 
the very poor people — spend all their lives in defending their 
lives until what is left of their lives is hardly worth defend- 
ing. 

In the same way that we realize how monstrous it would be for 
Germany to attack America because some Americans are not 
what they should be, or for Japan to attack America because 
some Americans are unfair to the Japanese, we realize that it is 
monstrous for us to think of Germany as solid Bernhardis or as 
millions of Lissauers, or as all rejoicing over the Lusitania or as 
all looking forward to the annexation of Belgium. 

Germany has the same problem that we have — of sorting peo- 
ple out. If she will wait a little for us to do it, we will wait a 
little for her to do it. 

If Germany will do as well in crowding back her militarists and 
fight-itchers in the next twenty years as we will in crowding out 
our short-ranged, i-sized business men, and if we will do as well in 
crowding out our i-sized business men as Germany already has in 



404 WE 

crowding out i-sized business men in Germany, we will not need 
to have armies to be afraid of each other with. 

All any nation needs to do is to be intelligently and construct- 
ively afraid of itself. If each nation will do what it can at home 
to protect itself from itself, it will be protected from other na- 
tions automatically. 

The best way for either Germany or America to carry the 
scheme through of protecting itself by seeing through itself is, not 
so much by paying a big bill for legislation, as by paying a big bill 
for publicity and for making people see through themselves and 
see through one another. If they see through themselves other 
nations will not have to fight them to get them to. 

The real defense of a country from other countries is its fear- 
lessness and courage in seeing through itself. Permanent, cheap, 
guaranteed national defense consists in the punishment and sub- 
jugation at home of men and institutions which expose the 
country to the just suspicion of the world. 

To protect America from war we will see to it that we are the 
kind of Americans everybody wants to be identified with and to 
deal with and that nobody wants to fight. 



VII 
ANOTHER SCENE (THE SALESMEN'S SCENE) 

If I were a German or a Frenchman or an Englishman, and if 
my government had sent me over to America a year ago when the 
present world-disturbance broke out and had delegated me to see 
what Americans were like and to study how large an armament 
my country would probably have to have to express its precise 
amount of trust or distrust of Americans, one of the first things 
I would have done would have been to study the ways the Amer- 
ican business men were using at that time in the back pages of 
the magazines to get people to buy what they had. 

One of the first things I would have discovered would have 
been the astonishing campaign some American business men 
were making the moment the war began, to persuade American 
people to form the habit of buying American goods. Many of 
my readers will have forgotten perhaps the tone of these early 
advertisements which were published in nearly all the maga- 
zines in those first months when the business doors of Europe 
were all slammed in the faces of the world, and we saw at last for 
the first time that we were a nation that stood alone. 

It was to me a tragic and pathetic sight in that great silent 
moment of the world when we could all look up almost any min- 
ute and see eleven nations in Europe committing suicide before 
our eyes, to see the manufacturers of America come gayly trip- 
ping in waving like schoolchildren their little patriotic flags in 
the magazines, at a time like this, a time when the people over 
there in the other nations were all so helpless, when they could 
not so much as make a pill or dye a stocking to defend their 
business, it was a strange and unhappy sight to me to have as we 

405 



406 WE 

did that huge crowd of American business men all shouting to us, 
to the great American people everywhere (any day, any maga- 
zine), all flocking out and shouting to us: '*0h, dear, beautiful 
American people, lend us your ears ! You see they are all dying 
over there now. They cannot do anything. We have no one to 
compete with us now! Do buy your goods of us! Do get the 
habit of buying your goods of us ! Put up the motto over your 
bed where your eyes fall on it first in the morning, * God bless our 
home' and 'Made in America.' Dear great American people, 
let all your beautiful pocketbooks, all your hopes for your 
country and your prayers, let them all be for America, let them 
all be for American factories, that, God helping us, American 
factories may wax fat, and that God may be praised in the 
groans of the nations." 

Of course the advertisements were decorously and studiously 
worded, and I cannot deny that the advertisements themselves 
literally reproduced in these pages would have kept up an ap- 
pearance of propriety and even almost (some of them) a look and 
tone of nobility in what they were attempting to do, more suc- 
cessfully no doubt than I have in my attempted translation of 
them. 

I cannot say that these advertisements afforded me much 
really comforting support in my idea that America is to defend 
herself by the self -revelation of her business men. 



vin 

WHINERS AND GETTERS 

If Europe absolutely knew and could absolutely prove that it 
could supply this country with what it wants to eat and to wear 
better than we can, if Europe wanted to get the attention of 
Americans once for all and all at once, and fully convince Ameri- 
cans forever, in three years, that they cannot afford to trade at 
home, Europe could not have schemed out a better arrangement 
than the one it has now. American producers have been 
presented by eleven nations with the complete, absolute faithful 
submissive attention of the American consumer. Not a Euro- 
pean manufacturer can peep or get a word in to-day with the 
American people. The European war is the most stupendous 
gift of advertising space, the most stupendous free lease of vast 
territories of attention to American manufacturers that has ever 
been dreamed of. This whole nation in a time of high cost of 
living, when it has to study to keep alive at all, is studying to-day 
morning, noon and night, what American manufacturers are like 
and how they run their business and how they make their 
goods. 

In the next three years the American people are going to find 
out, and find out for the rest of their lives, just how much better 
or just how much worse goods made in America are than other 
goods. 

The American producers look around them and they see the 
consumers of America on every hand being held up by the war, 
standing day after day with their hands up and their mouths 
open and their eyes shut by the war. All the American pro- 
ducers have to do is to put anything they like down into their 

407 



408 WE 

mouths and take anything they hke to charge for it out of their 
pockets. 

Will they do this or will they take a longer, shrewder course? 
What is going to happen? Which spirit are our manufacturers 
going to have? Which idea of America are they going to dram- 
atize to the world? 

If the manufacturers of America, now that they have the 
public on the hip, merely make the public wish the European 
nations would stop fighting and get to work so that the American 
public can buy something to eat once more and buy something to 
wear without feeling angry and hateful about it, the present 
stupendous advertisement of what American goods are really 
like, which Europe is paying fifty thousand dollars a day for 
America to have, is going to be the death blow of American goods 
for America. 

Europe has flung American manufacturers a challenge. There 
are two ways to meet it: One way is to take an advantage of 
our customers to-day which they will never forget. The other 
is to give them an advantage which they will never let go. The 
thing for the American manufacturer to do instead of paying 
small fortunes now to persuade consumers to be patriotic and 
buy of America, is to spend the money in getting the manufac- 
turers of America to make, for the next three years, better goods 
than they have to make, and instead of charging as much as they 
dare for the goods, charge as little as they dare, and prove that 
they can make prices that have never been dreamed of. 

America's fundamental problem of self-defense to-day instead 
of being: *'How can we get American consumers to buy Ameri- 
can goods?" narrows down to this: "How can we get better 
American producers and produce better American goods and 
lower American prices?" People are going to buy anyway. 
Now is our chance to make them buy forever. 

What we want from our American business men is not a whine 
about our buying American goods, but a complete answer to the 
question: "Why do we choose German or French instead of 



WHINERS AND GETTERS 409 

American manufacturers? " The only chance our manufacturers 
have is in combining to advertise to one another what bears on this. 

The national motto will be, "To be patriotic to-day, produce 
the goods and keep still. Produce the producers, and con- 
sumers will come of themselves." 

We are going to stop telling consumers in expensive advertise- 
ments what they ought to do. We are going to stop clutching 
at each other's souls with good advice and moral observations, 
and stop telling everybody sweetly but surely to be good, and 
telling them what they ought to do with what is in their souls. 
And we are going to stop pawing at each other's pockets and tell- 
ing other people what they ought to do with what is in their 
pockets. We are all going down to the factory in the morning 
from now^ on and mind our business until everybody wishes 
we would mind theirs ! We are going to save each other's money 
until the other nations put all their money in our hands to save. 

If every man in a factory is devoted to cooperating, to making 
the most of every other man in it, and the most of the goods and 
the most of the consumers' money, prices and goods in America 
will soon be the precise opposite of what the world expects of 
America now and of what iVmerica expects of herself. We will 
soon see signs like this on factories as we go by in trains: 

" Manufacturing Company, Headquarters for Saving 

Other People's Money." The best manufacturers, those who 
have the most imagination, are already beginning to break with 
the old-fashioned type of advertising man eternally harping on 
consumers, and they are looking for advertising men they can 
turn loose on producers, and who will be experts in telling the 
news to themselves about themselves. 

Three quarters of the advertising in this country that is being 
so expensively addressed to the consumers to-day is about to 
have substituted for it advertisements addressed to the manu- 
facturers telling them how to advertise and how to take steps to 
make Americans forever buy American goods. 

It is the people who make things that need advertising now in 



410 WE 

America. The big attention- jobbers and experts in changing 
men*s minds instead of putting in their work on buyers of goods 
will soon be seen putting it in on mechanical-minded stock- 
holders who will not let a factory-manager make his factory 
eflBcient, or on mechanical-minded managers who will not grant 
to their employees conditions for being efficient, or on mechani- 
cal-minded employees who fight against their employers and are 
disloyal all day to the goods. 

In other words, if the manufacturers of America want to make 
American people buy American goods forever, if they want to 
fill this country with patriotism and with joy, as it buys and sells, 
fill it with self-possession, with great, quiet, happy self-knowl- 
edge and self-respect, so that all America will buy of America 
because it wants to and because man for man it respects and 
enjoys American producers and the things Americans pro- 
duce, American manufacturers, instead of spending their big 
bill as they do now in telling the virtues of their goods, will spend 
their big bill on dramatizing the virtues in the goods, so that the 
goods will tell their own virtues, and so that the goods them- 
selves will seize people and seize the daily habits of people's 
lives, do their own advertising every day, all day, to the people, 
— by being lived with. 

As one virtue in American products seen being used, seen being 
dramatized before everybody, seen being organized into people's 
lives, will advertise it as much as ten virtues on paper, advertis- 
ing will be occupied for the next few years in making American 
business men profound, hard-headed, flexible and unconquer- 
able in the markets of the world because they have got past their 
superficial notions of quick money and immediate success, 
their notions of "They" or "It" and of foreigners, and have 
determined to be of real service to the whole world. 

Some will heed this self-education campaign among manu- 
facturers and others will not. T^lie result will be that we shall 
soon be having two great dramatic performances of what 
Americans are like to present daily before the nations. 



IX 
PUTTING THE NATIONAL PLAY TO A VOTE 

I might dwell a moment longer on the way the dramatic prin- 
ciple is going to control and determine the final fate of American 
manufacturers who are trying to get Americans to buy American 
goods. 

The great main general difficulty manufacturers have to meet 
in getting Americans to buy American goods is that most Ameri- 
cans live in America. Most Americans are employed by Ameri- 
can manufacturers and are engaged in making or in selling 
American goods. 

The idea that these American manufacturers for whom they 
work, want them to buy American goods is a literary idea. They 
read it in the magazines. 

The idea that they do not want to buy American goods if it 
can be helped is a dramatized idea. Being engaged in making 
American goods all day for American manufacturers and in put- 
ting in as little work as they can on them, they prefer to buy 
European ones. 

This makes one wonder if this wild, hopeful way in which many 
American employers are trying to-day to advertise American 
goods to the consumers in their parlours at night when they are 
tired and just going to bed is not superficial. All their con- 
sumers are wide awake all day observing how American goods 
are made in American shops. Would it not be better and 
cheaper to address them there .^^ 

As long as American manufacturers are keeping American con- 
sumers standing up at benches all day believing in the inferior- 
ity, inefficiency and extravagance of American goods, having it 

411 



412 WE 

drilled into them by the laziness, dishonesty and disloyalty and 
soldiering with which they and their employers make the goods, 
how little the goods are worth, it seems a comparatively super- 
ficial and very expensive thing to do to try to contradict an idea 
thirty million American workingmen are learning to believe 
about American goods nine hours a day, by getting them to read 
a few literary flourishes in the back pages of a magazine in the 
evening, telling them faintly and vaguely how superior Ameri- 
can goods are. 

Of course many thousands of American workingmen are so 
fortunate as to be employed by competent manufacturers, men 
who make them want to work as much instead of as little as they 
can. These workingmen in their capacity as buyers and con- 
sumers naturally believe in the superiority of American goods. 

The consumers of America divide off into two groups with 
regard to buying domestic or foreign products. Millions of 
people in America working in American factories know better 
than to buy what they are making in their own factories, and are 
spending nine hours a day in learning to trade somewhere else. 

Other millions, not so many million perhaps as yet, are work- 
ing in factories in a different spirit from this. They are engaged 
in learning nine hours a day that if other goods in America are 
being made the way theirs are, they want American goods. 

The fate of American business and manufacturing in our pres- 
ent national crisis turns upon getting our manufacturers in 
America to stop shutting up thousands of Americans in factories 
nine hours a day, and drilling the idea into their heads, day after 
day, all their lives, that they must buy goods not made in Amer- 
ica. 

The x\merican advertising men as it seems to me have not taken 
up more than about five per cent, of the business they might have. 
There is no reason why they should coop up their business with 
the consumer. 

If the advertising man in America, w^ith his power of arresting 



THE NATION VOTES ON ITS PLAY 413 

and holding attention, will stop expensively dinning away on 
consumers (who have to consume in America anyway just now), 
and will use pages of advertising space in every magazine in the 
country for the next twelve months in talking to these same 
people as producers (all readers are producers as well as con- 
sumers), and as employers and as employees, we would have 
factories from which American consumers would soon be buying 
American goods for life without being asked. 

The way to advertise the superiority of American goods to the 
consumer is not while he is consuming but while he is producing. 

The really serious and profitable work of advertising men the 
next twenty -five years is going to be subterranean and under the 
surface. It is going to be addressed to their clients, and not to 
their clients' customers. American manufacturers are going to 
pay enormous sums to have advertised to them news about 
themselves, to have advertised to them ways of making them- 
selves and of making other American employers superior. The 
first moment all inferior, ugly, fighting employers are seen every- 
where jumping down off the backs of American buyers while 
they work, we will see American buyers standing out for Ameri- 
can manufacturers while they buy. When all our people are 
being drilled nine hours a day in the superior way, in the faith- 
fulness with which American goods are being made, in the amaz- 
ing team-work between American manufacturers and American 
workingmen in making true goods, in saving money for their 
customers and themselves, we will not need to regard with awe 
the little label "Made in Germany" that looms to-day over all 
American life. 



To advertise goods to men while they make them would be 
great advertising. Great advertising, like an ice-berg, is nine 
tenths below the surface. 

Of course the reason that manufacturers usually advertise 
merely on top and to consumers is that' they find they are in a 



414 WE 

position afterward to make the consumer glad to pay them back 
what it costs them to tell the news about their goods. 

It would pay manufacturers as a whole equally well to com- 
bine to tell news to one another about one another. It would 
pay especially now in a crisis of the defense of a great nation 
whose business men are on trial before its own people and before 
the world. 

If our manufacturers will not pay for advertising themselves 
into seeing through themselves, the Government could well af- 
ford to pay for it until they will. 

At all events, the way to get the world's attention to American 
goods to-day is by getting the attention of the men who make 
them to the way they will have to be made and to the spirit in 
which they will have to be sold. 

The short-sighted spirit of just selling goods to people now, 
whatever the people think of us, or however soon they are going 
to get rid of us, is going to be stopped. 

A great and astonishing advertisement of iVmerica — of Ameri- 
ica to itself and of America to a world — has just been thrust into 
our hands by the war of the European nations. No such op- 
portunity to dramatize its industrial genius and scatter prestige 
or to sow disgrace broadcast and forever, through all the nations 
of the earth, has been presented to a nation since the world 
began. 

The fate of democracy, and with the fate of democracy the 
fate of the world, turns on how this great character-play, this 
stupendous self-revelation of a free people to kingdoms and 
empires comes out. 

I have written this chapter not in the interests of the partic- 
ular business of my own country, but to show that the failure or 
success of the business of my own country, as of any country, 
turns upon the way it dramatizes and acts out the personal 
qualities and gifts and traits of its people. 

If it is not our soldiers who are going to defend our country or 
to expose it to attack from others, if it is our business men and 



THE NATION VOTES ON ITS PLAY 415 

the way our business men dramatize to us and dramatize to 
everybody what Americans are Hke, it will be to the point next to 
consider in later chapters what the dramatic elements in Ameri- 
can business are and how they can be selected and arranged and 
made to operate in defense of the nation and for the peace of the 
world. I have believed that implacably, and in spite of us if need 
be, it shall be the We-men of America who shall know which those 
elements are, and will have the power to operate them, and 
shall bring peace to the hearts of the tired nations, and shall 
swing America out at last into the main stream of history and 
turn her — ^young, boundless, and full of hope — into the leader- 
ship of the world. 



THE VOTE FOR THE I-S 
THE VOTE FOR THE WE-S 

The reader has watched me in the last few chapters driving my 
idea into a corner where from his point of view perhaps only a 
very large army and navy could help me out. 

The last thing I should have attempted to do in a hopeful 
peaceful book like this was to point out the dramatic organi- 
zation of the modern world and the fact that American men 
and American ideas are being intimately and stupendously dram- 
atized to all nations in American business life. 

This will be the end of us, some of my readers will think. If 
our country is to be defended and expressed among the nations 
by the way we do business with them, we will need a larger army 
and navy than anyone (until this book was written) could have 
been scared into before. 

The more dramatic business is, the worse for us. 

It seems to me that it is this dramatic ruthlessness, the ter- 
rible childlike candor of business in expressing religious moral 
and human ideas, and in portraying people, which is going to 
save us, which is going to drive our people into a large-hearted- 
ness and steadiness, into a nobility and breadth and shrewdness 
of vision in dealing with others that nations and even religions 
have not dreamed of before. 

The natural conclusion is that if the We-men in American 
business and American life sweep the country and hold the 
national energies of America in their hands we will not need to 
be afraid and nobody will want to fight us. 

y16 



THE IS OR THE WES 417 

The reason that many Americans are being scared into 
the idea of a large army and navy is not so much that 
they are scared about Germany and Japan, as that they 
are scared about ourselves and about what Americans are 
probably like. They do not believe we can furnish the We- 
men. 

This scare about American human nature and how it is going 
to turn out and how at any time, owing to its stupid self-interest, 
or to its short-mindedness and to its i-sized business men and 
its lack of genius and of we-brains in dealing with Germany and 
Japan, iVmerican human nature may expose us to attack from 
these nations, is the point upon which our entire discussion of 
Preparedness turns. 

This brings the issue to a point. The real question we each 
have to face is whether we are or are not afraid of the way the 
American business man is going to represent America and ex- 
press what iVmericans are like to other nations. 

This is not the place to prove what the reader knows I am 
going to say in the next sentence. I have devoted 561 pages in 
"Crowds" and many chapters in this book to portraying what 
is in the next paragraph, and the reader, if he wants to, can 
look them up. If I could, I would write both books all over 
again, and insert them into this paragraph, if the reader would 
believe it when he reads it, as I do. 

The man who succeeds most will be the man who can get 
everybody to help him. 

The way for a man to get everybody to help him is to help 
everybody. 

There is no limit to the enthusiasm and unanimity with 
which people will accept a leader and help pile up success around 
him the moment they know the success is going to be given away 
right and left and shared with all classes in the community and 
with all kinds of people about him. 

They contribute to his success not only because they know 
they will get back their share, but because they feel that the 



418 WE 

man who divides success up in society, who makes it go around, 
is the man they would hke to have have it. 

The science of leadership turns in the last analysis, there- 
fore, on the science of being believed, the more or less exact 
science of picking out words and actions that inspire trust. 
This trust a man can inspire is the measure of the power men 
will hand over to him and of the liberty they will let him have. 

The measure of moral, spiritual, and religious power a man 
gains is, therefore, in a team-work, a machine age, a man's main 
business asset. 

This is why I am not afraid of the character of the men who 
are acquiring the upper hand in the national life and national 
expression of America. 

Owing to the trend and necessities of successful modern busi- 
ness, the victory of the We-men in America is grounded in the 
nature of things and cannot be helped. 

The dramatic nature of business is going to determine once 
for all, and insure once for all, in all branches of business in 
modern life the supremacy of men with dramatic and human 
gifts. The men who have a dramatic sense of the relation of 
others to themselves, and who have the gift of touching the 
imaginations and enthralling the attention of other men and of 
determining what other men want, and with whom other men 
will want to deal, are the men who necessarily fall into the 
control of the material world of buying and selling. These 
men by a natural force of gravity and by the nature of things, 
by the grim necessity of a civilization of machines, are the ones 
who will do what they wish with x\merica. It is they who in 
our behalf will dramatize America, dramatize American men 
and American goods, American money and American service 
to the world, until it shall come to pass that no nation shall be 
in a position to attack these men — i. e., to attack America — 
without attacking itself, without attacking its own people, in 
their own dooryards, kitchens, in their own stores, markets 
and nurseries, in their play and work, in their own factories. 



THE IS OR THE WES 419 

creeds and tools, and every utensil of their daily life, and in their 
own pews in church. Everything that people in other nations use 
and everything that they believe will be attacked if they attack 
us. 

If the We-men in America, or the world-sized men, are about 
to sweep the country and if everything that We-men believe in 
business and everything that the We-men do in it the whole coun- 
try is presently going to believe and going to do — a huge 
armament not only will not be needed but it will hang upon us 
as an embarrassment, a contradiction of the nation, will foil us 
at every point in expressing with magnificent, hopelessly uncom- 
promising clearness our main idea about ourselves as a peaceful 
people. If this nation does not believe we are a peaceful people 
and that we can get things by peace and give things by peace, 
we cannot hope to make other nations believe it. Our main 
idea, which we are to defend ourselves from other nations by 
expressing, is our trust in ourselves and our trust in them. By 
spending our money every day on our brains and on their 
brains instead of our army, we will prove it. We will prove that 
we really believe we can express ourselves to one another and 
to other nations like human beings by the wholesale courage 
with which we depend and depend without contradiction and 
without qualification upon our power to express ourselves like 
human beings, upon our power to define our motives, powers, 
and intentions and to reveal and announce our souls to other 
people, to advertise and dramatize our souls to the men, women 
and children of all nations. 

As a substitute for a great army and navy, we are ready to 
undertake a huge, deliberate, engineering feat of assailing the at- 
tention of the world. 

Without recklessness, without vagueness, with shrewdness, 
quietness and matter-of-factness, we believe we have the 
brains to trust other nations. We believe we have the brains 
to make them trust us. 



XI 
THE WE-S HAVE IT 

The real war-danger America confronts to-day is the war over 
human nature. It is for this war that iVmerica is about to take 
its subhme and final stand of preparedness. 

A part of our people are afraid of human nature. They 
are afraid that the big motives and the long-range methods are 
not the ones that work with men and women. 

A part of our people are not afraid of human nature. They 
believe that only the big things and the big men can have ma- 
terial success with it, and that mean motives, small men and 
physical force are doomed forever by the inherent, cooperative 
nature of modern material life. 

The real war we face and that we must be prepared for to- 
day is the war between the people who are scared and the people 
who are not scared. It would be very convenient for America 
if we could take all the people who are scared, move them off 
quietly but firmly to some continent on the planet which they 
could have quite by themselves, and let them start a set of 
institutions, customs and ideas and business methods that are 
as scared as they are and that naturally work well with scared 
people. The rest of us who are not scared would then have 
the rest of the planet all cleared off for ourselves, would be 
able to drop all our scared impedimenta, all the moral nervous- 
prostration arrangements, that people braced for panics have 
to have humped up on top of their lives, and we would proceed 
to establish institutions as unscared as we are and that naturally 
work very well with people who are afraid of nobody, and who 
know that nobody is afraid of them. 

V20 



THE WE-S HAVE IT 421 

These are two totally different and irreconcilable ideas of a 
country . As it is obvious that people who disagree with us cannot 
be disagreed with on a separate continent, the next best thing 
we can do is to learn in detail how to agree to disagree here, 
where we are all living together, make a clean-cut issue, line 
up to it man for man, decide what Americans are like, un jumble 
American life before each other's eyes, begin a definite line of 
policy with definite men who believe it, to carry it out. We 
will pick out our confession of faith to make to the nations. 
We will then proceed to act in the eyes of all the nations with 
a terrible and naive simplicity as if we knew precisely what 
we were about and what we are going to be about for a hundred 
years. 

America* to-day, with Congress assembled, is to decide what 
she is like. 

If we decide we are a scared people, the President will have 
to stand for a very large army and a very large navy. 

If we decide to shape our history and clamp down our in- 
stitutions to a theory of perpetual rows of possible Lusitanias, 
we will plan one kind of America. If we get out from under 
our Lusitania madness and come to our senses and see that 
Germany and Japan, with all their generals hanging like mill- 
stones about their necks, cannot long exist or cannot long be 
anything to be afraid of unless they come to theirs, we will 
plan another. 

America is either going to have a scared policy and big arma- 
ment, or she is going to arm herself with a magnificent shrewd- 
ness, a courage about history and about human nature, that 
only a country winnowed out of the hopes of all nations, a 
country which converges all peoples and all histories into her 
wide prairies and her sunned mountains, a country with the 
ends of the ages fallen upon her, could hope to have. 

It is the world's hope that we shall have it. 



LOOK IV 

THE SCIENCE OF BEING BELIEVED 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A $10,000 BILL 
THE REVERIES OF A RAILROAD 

THE other day in passing through I found myself 
looking every time I passed under a church steeple at 
a big placard posted up on the house of the Lord. The 
placards all had on them bits of good advice, spiritual counsels 
quoted from big business houses. On one street I heard a 
church saying: " Promotioji only to Total Abstainers in the Car- 
negie Steel Works.'' On another I saw this searching question 
addressed to every passer-by by the House of the Lord: *^Why 
do the Life Insurance Companies . . ?" And another one, 
*' Why do the Railroads . . . ?" 

It seemed to me a very pretty sight, to see everywhere as I 
passed through the city, the churches trying to get people to 
be good as they went by, and quoting from the presidents of 
Steel Corporations instead of the Apostles, and shoving out in 
front of people one big business after the other, that people 
ought to notice more, govern their lives by more, and try to be 
like. 

It may seem a little odd at first to see the churches in this 
way, gravely, hopefully setting Big Business to doing their 
preaching for them to the people. 

But as the way that real people learn real things is eight 

422 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A $10,000 BILL 423 

hours a day, through the way they are employed, and as the 
daily, hourly, spiritual interests of the world, and the virtues, 
sincerity, service, efficiency and mutual interests of the people 
have all been placed in business men's hands, the sight I saw 

in the other day is but a forecast of the new detailed 

spiritual revelation that is already coming to the world from the 
masters of materials, from the employers of labour, and the 
experts in human relations, now being called for, and now being 
supplied under the conditions of successful business in modern 
life. 

The policy of preparedness I favour for America is based upon 
the way American capital and American labour to-day are 
educating each other. More and more every day under our 
present conditions business men are being compelled to bring re- 
ligion into the daily working lives of their people and into their 
own, or they do not get things done. 

In an age of democracy, an age in which people are supposed 
to have their own way and express themselves, and in an age of 
machinery, an age in which they are supposed not to have their 
own way and to do team-work and express others, the only 
possible practical course big business corporations can take, if 
they are to do business at all, is to move forward into positions of 
power men who have a religious, or, more strictly speaking, a 
dramatic gift of putting themselves in other people's places, a 
genius for making men believe them so that the men can do team- 
work and have their own way at the same time. 

A man who can make people believe in him furnishes common 
ground. People feel that in letting him make his way they will 
be practically getting theirs, or at least what is best, or all that 
they would really want of theirs. 

It is only by a dramatic drill in one another's lives in the art of 
putting men in each other's places that people can have their own 
way and other people's way at the same time. 

In a machine age or a man-organization or team-work age, 
material success has come to be based upon a spiritual secret, and 



424 WE 

only spiritual men can get control of it. Under the new stupen- 
dous spiritual difficulties and spiritual opportunities machinery 
and democracy have created for us, business of all kinds in Amer- 
ica to-day can be seen before everyone's eyes being edged and 
crowded over helplessly into the hands of the spiritual men, the 
men who have the longest, furthest, and deepest imagination 
about the rights and powers of others. 

Whatever may happen in the way of getting the churches in 
America to be religious, and there are days when one is dis- 
couraged about them, the business world from to-day on in 
America is going to be religious. It could not keep from being 
religious if it tried. 

The ruling modern business man is going to be religious be- 
cause he has got to be dramatic in order to get things done. 

Every stupendous business problem is a dramatic problem, and 
it can only be worked out by what might be called a religious 
drill or spiritual feat the men at the top have to put themselves 
through, in seeing and combining the points of view of others. 
Those who put themselves through of their own accord will get 
through first, and the employers who have to wait to be forced 
to see things by others are falling behind in the race. 



On the railroads of America to-day ten thousand dollars is 
being set one side for every man who works on a railroad and 
is put into supplying him with his job. 

When one goes down to a railroad track and watches a row of 
fifty men with shovels and picks, what one is really watching is 
half a million dollars hard at work, ten thousand dollars to a 
man. 

If the ten-thousand-dollar bill each man has at work for him 
and at work with him could be dramatized, if there were some 
way in which the Pennsylvania Railroad for instance could take 
a good honest working ten-thousand-dollar bill out of its vault 
in the bank, if the anonymous, invisible, intangible, silent ten- 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A $10,000 BILL 425 

thousand-dollar bill could be made over into a man, if the man 
the ten-thousand-dollar bill has given his job to could see The 
Bill, could see the ten-thousand-dollar bill bending over with him 
and sweating with him while he worked, the problem of Ameri- 
can business life would be solved. 

The problem of American business life is the problem of 
dramatizing capital to labour and of dramatizing labour to capi- 
tal, so that they will both be able to keep their eyes on each other 
and keep each other straight and have a sound rock-bed basis for 
honest loyal team-work. The trouble all comes from keeping 
the facts dark. 

Everybody knows that an honest, inventive ten thousand 
dollars honestly earned and honestly invested, and honestly and 
shrewdly administered, works as hard with its brains in a stu- 
pendous business age like this as any man ever could or ever did 
with his hands. 

The only possible way to make the man with the pick reason- 
able toward the man with the ten thousand dollars is to find 
some way of letting him be right alongside and see how that ten 
thousand dollars works. 

The man with the ten thousand dollars and the man with the 
pick have got to be got together. 

They are being got together every day. 

I often watch two men driving in a spike on a railroad track. 
One raises his sledge one second and drives down on the spike, 
and the other raises his sledge the next second and drives down 
on the spike. They are both there as a matter of fact, the 
ten-thousand-dollar bill and the railroad hand it has given the 
job to, swinging away together every minute on the same spike, 
and all that has to be done to make them loyal to each other and 
to make them work hard for each other and with each other is to 
find some way of dramatizing the fact to the workman that the 
ten-thousand-dollar bill is there. There must be some way of 
making him feel its breath and hear it puffing. 

The whole problem of getting capital and labour trued and 



4!26 WE 

of making them do efficient team-work seems to narrow down 
eventually into a dramatic problem — a problem of picking out 
words and actions that will make men see each other's work. 

Of course I admit that what I am saying only applies to an 
honest ten- thousand-dollar bill. I do not deny that if the 
average ten thousand dollars was lined up to work on the track 
with the average labourer, with the idea of having the labourer 
see how ten thousand dollars could sweat, the ten thousand dol- 
lars would get the worst of it, and the labourer it belonged with 
and that it had working for it would be lazier and uglier than 
ever. 

But this would be good for the ten thousand dollars. It 
would soon have to set to work as hard as the labourer did. And 
then it would be good for the labourer. 



A few years ago when one of the popular magazines had asked 
me to write a series of articles on the opportunities and limita- 
tions of the Steel Trust, as they looked from Mount Tom, I had 
a preliminary interview with Judge Gary, and immediately 
l)egan work upon what seemed to me at the time an especially 
interesting project. The best way to express my ideas about 
American business obviously would be to have the Steel Trust, 
the business the most people in the country were watching and 
studying every day, dramatize them. If the Steel Trust could 
make the newer ideas of team-work between capital and labour 
successful, all other corporations would proceed to adopt them as 
a matter of course. 

I never finished the series of articles, because I found as I went 
on that it was not a perfectly loose scattered public dotted 
around the country reading magazines to whom I wanted to ad- 
dress what I had to say about the Steel Trust. When I knew 
how the situation stood inside the Steel Trust I found that the 
only thing it interested me to do would have been writing a 
private book with a padlock on it for private circulation among 



THE REVERIES OF A RAILROAD 427 

the stockholders in which I would try to interpret the big cen- 
tury-sighted, We-sized men among the stockholders in the Steel 
Trust to the little one-year-eyed, i-sized ones. 

The idea of writing articles to the public stretching away in 
galleries and to the general spectator seemed to me roundabout 
and irrelevant and was given up. 

My mind went through somewhat the same experience when 
the Pennsylvania Railroad, as I have previously mentioned, 
wrote me one day, saying: *'If you were the manager of the 
Pennsylvania Railroad and were writing a New Year's greeting 
to your two hundred thousand men, what would you say .^^ " 

There was only about a week left before New Year's, and as 
nearly as I could calculate, it would take me about fifty years to 
express in a few graceful words a great railroad like the Penn- 
sylvania even to its own employees. I would want an- 
other fifty to express it to the country, but I began the day the 
letter came, to jot down a kind of rough sketch of what I would 
try to express to the trainmen and workmen, if I could, and of 
what I thought some one would really express sometime. It 
would be better to be concrete, I thought, and I wrote something 
word for word just the way I felt as a railway manager and 
mailed it to the Broad Street Station. I put in a line saying that 
of course I was not Manager of the Pennsylvania Railroad and 
that of course I was not sending a New Year's greeting from the 
offices of the road to its men, but if I were — being who I was 
. well, here is a general idea of what I said I would try to 
say — to be posted up on doors and in the roundhouses and on 
bulletin boards: 

Executive Office Pennsylv^ania Railway, 

Broad Street Station, Philadelphia. 

A Happy New Year from the Broad Street Station to the Pennsyl- 
vania Railroad! Here's to you all! To every roundhouse and signal- 
box, to every shop-window, hammer and lathe, roaring train and 
echoing freight house, waiting-room and junction! — seven thousand 
miles of steel rails, two hundred thousand men and four thousand 
locomotives — a Happy New Year! 



428 WE 

To every Pennsylvania Railway man's home, to his wife and to his 
children on New Year's Night, as the trains roar and the bells ring, a 
Happy New Year! . . . 

When I had written as far as this I stopped a minute to think. 
I began to criticise what I was writing. I remembered as I read 
it over slowly what railroad officials as a rule were supposed by 
their men to be like, what grave, distant, official-minded people 
railroad officers often were, and how their men were used to hav- 
ing them express themselves. 

But I knew the officers and I knew their spirit toward things 
and what they were like at heart and I felt in a way, too, that I 
knew the men and what they were like too, at heart, and that 
after all it was just a convention that made or seemed to make it 
necessary for railway men to use words in official documents that 
had a kind of dull, proper wooden thud in them, as if no matter 
how human they really might be, they did not want men they 
paid out millions of dollars to, to know it. 

I decided I would brush everything one side and write a letter 
in which I treated both sides as I knew — underneath at least — 
they really were. So I went on like this. ... (It would 
not really do probably, and would have to be saved and used in 
1925, but I proposed to express the spirit, the intention and 
hope of a great railroad as a great railroad really felt it, whether 
it had ever mentioned it or not.) 

NEW YEAR'S MEMORANDUM 

The Oflfices of this Company are not solely inhabited by angels, and 
all the angels on our payrolls have not been quite sorted out yet and 
paid probably as they should be, but we are doing the best we can and 
now here's 1925. 

The Officers of this Company regard themselves as being employed 
by the folks who ride in their trains to help them to be somewhere else 
as rapidly, safely and cheaply as possible. 

And they regard themselves as being employed by the owners of 
the steel rails, cars and stations to represent the seven thousand miles 
of their property with the men who use it. 

And they regard themselves as being employed by the engineers. 



THE REVERIES OF A RAILROAD 429 

agents, workmen and trainmen on the line to represent their interests 
with the pubHc and with the stockholders. 

As they understand it, their job consists in doing good honest team- 
work for all these people, giving everybody as good service, as good 
pay, as fair profit, and as permanent a job, as honest team-work re- 
quires. 

And this is the way the Broad Street Station feels to-day in wishing 
this Railroad seven thousand miles of Happy New Year. We are 
wishing you all a Happy New Year without giving advice, without 
sliding in a moral, or pointing at people, or telling everybody except 
ourselves things they ought to do. The Broad Street Station wishes 
the Pennsylvania Railroad and every man on it three hundred and 
sixty-five happy days this next year of getting on well with this Office 
and helping it to do its duty, and in the present industrial crisis of 
this nation, to measure up to its destiny, to be human and faithful 
before its men, its own people, before the people on the line, before the 
nation, and before God. 

So here is our wish for you, for ourselves, and for the Pennsylvania 
Railway. May the Pennsylvania Railway in the Year of Our Lord 
1925 — every day, all night, all day, put itself in training from New York 
and Pittsburgh to Chicago, to be one of the institutions this democracy 
is proud of, one of the faiths of the people, a great adventure in the 
sight of all, of two hundred thousand men, one thousand officers, and 
seven thousand miles of railroad, all proving once for all to the people 
that an American Corporation can have a soul and that American 
Human Nature can work — until this railroad shall become a living, 
moving, rolling symbol, a witness flaming it and thundering it past the 
proud cities and the little villages, that a great spirit in a great business 
is making good. Past our dooryards, past our steeples, while we sleep 
and while we work, the trains shall go calling it in our faces day and 
night that justice between man and man, mutual forgiveness and 
mutual patience, and mutual expectation have stretched out their 
might, have founded a great human business on the face of the earth ! 

And this is what the Broad Street Station means when it wishes the 
other stations along the line, the ticket windows and signal boxes and 
trainsheds and bells and whistles, the crowds flying along the rails, 
the faces thronging through the stations, and the faces in the cabs — ■ 
a Happy New Year! 



After I had written the letter and had put it off for ten or 
fifteen years, I sat and wondered why it was that I could not 
make a letter like this, as I read it over and thought of the men 
standing in front of the roundhouses reading it New Y'ear's 



430 WE 

morning, why was it I could not seem to make the letter ring 
more true? 

I soon came on the reason. While the workingmen on the 
road might have received many indications that the men in the 
Broad Street oflBces were men who felt about their railroad and 
about their men like this, and while they already had given 
many little proofs that the ideas I had expressed were the ideas 
the officers really had and were daily working out, was it not 
perhaps a little premature for the officers of the Pennsylvania 
Railroad to express themselves to their men very much in words 
— just this year? The same words would ring truer on the 
roundhouses next New Year's. There were so many Qonvinc- 
ing ways the men could think of while they read the Greeting 
that their officers could express these same ideas without saying 
anything at all. There were certain things that they and the 
stockholders could do and do at once that would really expres- 
these ideas better than words could, and that would have to be 
attended to first before the words would help. 

So instead of writing a letter of greeting to the workingmen 
on the Pennsylvania Road from the executive offices in the 
Broad Street Station, I wanted to write a letter of greeting 
from the men, two hundred thousand trackmen and trainmen 
and workmen to the Broad Street Station. 

The gist of the letter would be a list of ideas they would 
like to see dramatized. 

If I could express for the two hundred thousand men on 
the Pennsylvania Railroad the idea they wanted to see drama- 
tized by the Broad Street Station, and if I could so express 
these ideas to the Broad Street Station that the Broad Street 
Station the next morning would proceed to pick out the actions 
that would dramatize them, I would indeed have succeeded at 
last in wishing the two hundred thousand men on the Penn- 
sylvania Railroad a Happy New Year ! 

So I arrived with the railroad where I had arrived with the 
Steel Trust. i 



THE REVERIES OF A RAILROAD 431 

The best way I could express my ideas in words was to express 
them to men who could express them in action. 

All I want to do with words, now, is to use them in such a 
way and to address them in such a quarter, that it will be 
easier for employers to be better dramatists. 



II 

THE NEW WOMAN'S WAY OF STAGING A BUSINESS 

Fifty years ago one could go into any great city and pick out 
the best hundred employers in that town and get them in a 
room together and talk to them, and would find they were all 
different types of men. 

The successful manufacturer of hardware was one kind of an 
employer. He was interested in iron things, a kind of blacksmith 
in his heart, and knew how to make men enthusiastic about 
making iron, and he could talk about iron things. 

The man who made furniture was another kind. He could 
talk about wooden things and had a genius for making other 
men love to work in wood. The man who made cart wheels, 
the man who made drain pipes, the man who made steel rails, 
were all men who were wrought through with the substances in 
which they worked; they were experts in the substances in 
which they worked. They succeeded as emploj^ers, because 
cotton cloth and china, drain pipes and steel rails were the 
particular things they could make with enthusiasm and which 
they could use to make other people enthusiastic. 

To-day, after fifty years of machinery and fifty years of 
democracy piled on top of machinery, you go into the same 
city, you pick out the hundred most successful business em- 
ployers in each of these lines and get them together in the Board 
of Trade, and you will find yourself talking face to face with a 
hundred employers in a hundred different lines who are all 
practically alike. They would have different temperaments 
and some of them would have dark hair, and some of them light 
hair, and some would be silent and some would smile shrewdlv 

432 



THE NEW WOMAN'S WAY 433 

and others would laugh and slap you on the back, but they 
would all work over the stony soil of your heart in the same way. 
If you had money in your pocket they wanted to get, they 
would all try to get it practically by employing the same gifts. 
Their gifts would look different. Some of them would be af- 
fable and smoke your money out of your pocket and others 
would make you buy their goods by being silent and ugly, but 
they would all strike you as belonging to precisely the same pro- 
fession. With a hundred great employers in a room, you would 
find yourself in the presence of a hundred professioiial experts in 
human nature, specialists in attracting, deserving, and holding 
men's attention, geniuses in making men do what they like. 

They would all be men who were succeeding by a profound 
study of the driving forces of human lives : they would be scien- 
tists in the art of being believed, masters of picturing their 
wills, of dramatizing their ideas in the minds and lives of others. 

Everybody who has ever been to a play knows that some 
plays are more dramatic than others and has probably noticed 
that what a play really is made up of is a web of little things 
people do which reveal big things in the people. 

The more powerful a play is as a dramatic production, the 
more of those very big things are crowded into the little ones. 
If it is only thinly or feebly dramatic, the little things are just 
little things. 

The same principle holds good naturally for business men in 
making a business dramatic, and in making everything that is 
done or said in their shops and factories mean something to 
people. 

I spent a few days in Cleveland last week, and I was taken 
about everywhere and shown the things that people in cities 
show visitors, all the things that should be seen and that should 
be remembered afterward, and when I got back, as I did the 
other day, and began thinking about what had been happening 
to me and all I had seen in Cleveland, the thing that stood out 
most, the thing that loomed up in Cleveland as I looked back 



434 WE 

— was a suspender button on a pin-cushion in room 802 in the 
Hotel. 



Perhaps I should not have been impressed so. But I had 
seen colleges and college presidents and city clubs and factories 
before, and this was my first suspender button — ^at least the 
first one I ever really appreciated. 

The Hotel is a skyscraper, a kind of steel and glass 

machine for supplying sleep to people. There are seven hundred 
rooms with bath in it, and when I had been shot up to the eighth 
floor and deposited in pigeonhole number 802 and left alone with 
my bags and my thoughts four hundred miles from home, and 
when my eye fell on that white pincushion on my bureau and I 
saw that little humble suspender button and the threaded 
needle by it, I w^as touched, and I w^ondered about the woman 
who had put it there. Was Cleveland full of women like that? 

Before I went to sleep I almost said good-night to that pin- 
cushion. I w^ent to sleep thinking of the seven hundred other 
men going to sleep, too. I thought of the long perpendicular 
column of bedrooms I was in, rooms shaped precisely like mine 
above me, below me, all of us lying there like chewing gum in a 
slot-machine, a kind of slot of sleepiness, and yet all going to 
sleep feeling gathered around, protected, and thought-for from 
their suspender buttons to their souls by Mrs. Plunkett of the 
Hotel . 

This was the first stage of my experience. In the morning 
while I was dressing (it w^as like an inspiration) a suspender 
button came off — a thing that has not happened to me aw ay 
from home for twenty years — came off with that new happy 
suspender button for me two feet away staring me in the face ! 

I have not been so pleased wdth anything my clothes have 
done to me for years as having that button wait to come off 
until that morning. Then Mrs. Plunkett, instead of being 
abstract poetry as she had been the night before, became ap- 
plied poetry. I wanted to thank her as soon as I got my coat 
on. 



THE NEW WOMAN'S WAY 435 

But of course I restrained myself. I thought in time of how 
it must be if she were in the breakfast-room, for instance, of 
how there would be men in clusters probably every morning 
standing there before her waiting with their grateful suspender 
buttons on, to thank her for making a skyscraper seem like a 
cottage. 

It makes it comparatively comfortable to think of the New 
Woman since I have had Mrs. Plunkett's button on. 

Woman used to belong in a little cottage under a hill. She 
put a lamp in the window for her husband to see as he came 
home in the cold and the dark or a few flowers on the table. 
To-day she is going to be just what she has always been, except 
that she is going to insist on being a woman in more places, and 
more of the time, and on a bigger scale than she has wanted to 
before. Under a thousand smoky chimneys — I can see it com- 
ing — she is going to slip in and be the Mother of Factories. 
She is going to appropriate streets and railway trains, hotels and 
City Halls and make a home for a man to go to downtown in, a 
home for him to make money in, and make a city as snug as a 
cottage. 

All industry to-day, from the dispensing room in a factory 
to the directors' room on a railroad, is getting helplessly and 
characteristically dependent for its efficiency on the woman's 
touch. The touch that pulls any particular man together from 
the beginning of the world is going to be the touch that pulls 
all men together. There is scarcely a big manufacturing busi- 
ness known to-day which is not inefficient for the lack of the 
things that a Mrs. Plunkett would think of in it. 

Labour and Capital — those two grave, solemn, old he-fools — 
have blundered into nearly everything that is the matter with 
them to-day because the things any woman would think of in 
male human beings, the little big things a woman sees and 
plays on in human nature, have been passed over. 

Here is the New York, New Haven and Hartford Road, for 
instance, the directors all looking askance at the managers, the 



436 WE 

towns on the road all wishing they were off of it, the trainmen 
all wishing they were on some other road, and the trains all 
wishing they were on some other track, and trying to get there, 
all because men cannot understand each other, oil each other, 
and work with each other. 

What it really wants — the New York, New Haven and Hart- 
ford Railroad — in addition to its mechanical inventors, is a 
thousand plunkett-power Mrs. Plunkett to tend the thousand 
thousand little annoying over-and-over, forever-and-ever things 
that keep the men out of sorts. 

A railroad may be quite grand, but it cannot reallj^ work 
men and make men work the way a woman can. 

It may be a rather informal way to speak of a great, stately, 
worried corporation, but what the New York, New Haven and 
Hartford Railroad needs to-day, as it looks from Mount Tom, 
is some one to sew on its suspender buttons. 

I do not like to end these somewhat cursory remarks without 
saying how cheerful I have come to feel since I have thought of 
this about the New Woman . 

The New Woman, as I take it, may be said to be the woman 
who is doing as well with me as Eve did with Adam. No 
extras. Nothing different really. And the same idea. The 
woman of to-day finds the skyscrapers, factories and railroads 
waiting to be made human and personal. And all she is going 
to do next is to proceed to be as new as Eve was. What Eve 
did with her own delightful little backyard the New Woman is 
going to do with Union Square and Sixth Avenue. The New 
Man — now that he has discovered the dramatic values in busi- 
ness, the profit of personalizing his idea, and humanizing his 
machinery — is not so far from The Woman point of view. 

There is nothing revolutionary about this. 

The main item of business success in modern life is a man's 
dramatic sense of what touches other people's imaginations 
and rouses their sense of his value to them — their sense of what 
he is like and their sense of trusting him, and of therefore trust- 



THE NEW WOMAN'S WAY 437 

ing his goods — their sense of the service a man of this type 
can be trusted, without watching, to render to all who deal with 
him. 

The best and cheapest little things to pick out in a business 
to emphasize are those that humanize and personalize it, re- 
veal the personalities, motives, intentions of the men who run 
it — ^the most for the least money. 

When people's imaginations have been touched with a man 
or a corporation's personality, they take for granted with one 
sweep thousands of other important things. It is not open to 
argument that the cheapest, most permanent investment, no 
matter how much it costs, any business can make, is in person- 
ality, in personal human self -revelation, in credit, in being 
trusted by millions of men. 

As some personal self -revelation of himself or his firm, made 
dramatically or by what is actually done in the business, is 
necessary to this end, the We-genius or sense of identity with 
others has at last swung itself out into full possession of the 
modern business world as the determining and implacable 
factor of success. 



Ill 

THE NEW EMPLOYER'S WAY 
THE NEW SALESMAN'S WAY 

I am not sure whether I will seem to have made my point 
about the way the dramatic nature of modern business is forc- 
ing the business into the* hands of the men that all America 
will tiTust and that will make all the world trust America — into 
the hands of its most truly great men. 

I may seem to be looking a little faj- ahead on Mount Tom, 
but I believe that many men who cannot quite agree with me 
to-day will admit that most of the business men they know are 
getting ready to agree with me to-morrow or day after to- 
morrow. The most extraordinary and revolutionary energy 
which the world is experiencing to-day is the education of capital 
and labour. The first indication of this is the new and rather 
sudden lurch of general humility people are beginning to notice 
in employers. In a hundred years from now, when people begin 
looking back upon to-day, they will say that the great spiritual 
experience of the world in the twentieth century was the educa- 
tion of employers. 

Some years ago, before I had been much thrown with busi- 
ness men, my main feeling about large employers was that they 
ived cooped up from the world behind high hedges of secre- 
taries and spent all their time in having their own way with 
their own minds, and in protecting themselves from other peo- 
ple's ideas. What they were for was to tell other people things. 
I had the idea, as many people do still, that being at the top of 
a big business, was an ordering instead of an inquiring position. 

438 



NEW EMPLOYERS AND NEW SALESMEN 439 

My present experience among the men who are most dis- 
tinguished for their success as great employers of labour is that 
their success instead of leaving them with the fine, soothing, 
comfortable, educated feeling, the feeling one sees people having 
on college faculties, and instead of making them more dogmatic 
and more military-minded every year, makes them more humble. 
They are really rather wistful and desperately open-minded per- 
sons. 

It makes them rather attractive, living as I do, in a town in 
which I see season after season the warm, cheerful, social life 
of the people about me all being sealed over, as tight as a pond 
in winter with college professors. It has been borne in upon 
me from time to time that the educated feeling is not always in 
this world the most powerful and useful feeling a man can have, 
and while of course I am only at best a kind of escaped or re- 
formed college professor myself, I am cherishing the hope now 
that by associating with business men enough I am getting to 
be a better and a humbler man every day. Every time when 
I break away from my old associations and run down to New 
York or go about among employers, I find I almost never come 
on a business man now who has a cool, finished, comfortable, 
educated feeling like a college professor. It is only the presi- 
dent in a college, the man who is set up over college professors, 
the man who is the employer of them all, who is humble. He 
alone in a college seems to be allowed now a daily, uneducated, 
wistful feeling of wishing he knew more, like any other employer. 
When I took up literature as a profession I snuggled up to a 
college library and began writing literature about literature. I 
never intended to write about the modern business man. I 
was first drawn to him because out of all the men of the different 
professions I knew the modern employer is almost the only 
man who seems to have the same feeling that I have, of not 
being educated yet. 

I have seen a newsboy with fifteen cents hiring another news- 
boy and doing it with a fine, swaggering, highly informed airi 



440 WE 

and of course it is still true in the less important precincts of 
society that almost anybody with a dollar and a half thinks he 
can be an employer. 

But to the man who really arrives, or who is just arriving, 
being an employer to-day has become the profoundest, most 
noble, most creative, and most skilful of all the professions. 

Looked at in his capacity of doing good or harm to society, 
there are times when one feels that any man who wants to be 
an employer should have to take out a license for it. Captains 
on the high seas have to have licenses because once or twice in a 
lifetime they may collide with somebody. Chauffeurs have 
licenses because once or twice they may collide with somebody. 
An employer may spend his whole daj^, every day, nine hours a 
day, colliding with people, with cities, colliding with his work- 
men, stockholders, colliding with his partners, and half the time 
running around obstinately and colliding with himself, and doing 
infinitely more damage than anybody else does, and everybody 
seems to think that as long as he has his dollar and a half, or 
fifteen thousand dollars, or fifteen million dollars, he is an em- 
ployer. 

But I notice that the man who has a dollar and a half gets 
more feeling of being superior per dollar than a man with fifteen 
dollars would. iVn employer with fifteen hundred dollars who 
employs one, feels still less educated, and the employer who 
swings into the business a hundred and fifty thousand or fifteen 
million dollars has no educated feeling at all. 

And as a matter of fact, when one thinks of it, what reason 
is there after all in this year 1916 why any employer should feel 
educated.'* 

Being an employer at all in the real modern sense is an en- 
tirely new idea. Nobody has ever been an employer before. 
Machinery has made being an employer practically a new pro- 
fession in the last forty years, and democracy which has followea 
machinery has made it a new profession within ten years. If 
one is being an employer with a city poking its head in through 



NEW EMPLOYERS AND NEW SALESMEN 441 

the window every few minutes and watching how one does it, 
one is not up against the old, plain, simple-minded job of just 
jogging along with one's work. When one has (as Theodore 
N. Vail of the Telephone Company has) ninety million people 
on the other side of the fence bobbing up their heads at one over 
it almost any minute, or gathering in little crowds and com- 
missions and watching one through a knothole, one never feels 
really natural as a business man until business is over. One 
wonders as one goes to bed what the great poet who originated 
the phrase meant, when he said, "Business is business." 

The last thing business is, is business. It is thrown in upon 
one every day. Business is politics. Business is statesmanship. 
Business is a national study in human nature. 

Democracy has taken a little snug convenient job like being 
an employer and knocked it open at both ends and made it the 
most recklessly exposed, colossal, powerful and masterful of all 
the professions. The competent employer to-day wants to 
get people to believe in him enough to allow him to run his 
business himself. Being an employer to-day is the business of 
making ninety million people understand. This takes an artist. 
If Shakespeare had undertaken as a side order — the order of 
making ninety million people understand — if he had under- 
taken the order of making ninety million people believe in him 
enough to let him write his plays the way he wanted to himself, 
he would have gone under before he got half through Hamlet. 
Nobody would ever have heard of him. 

This is what democracy has done. Being an employer to-day 
is an act of expression that would have made Shakespeare's 
knees knock together. 

One need not wonder that many employers to-day do not 
feel educated. 

What machinery piled on top of democracy has done to being 
an employer is still worse. Being an employer used to be — 
before machinery — a kind of simple-minded, sober, hardwork- 
ing, sweaty calling. The employer hoed and mopped his brow 



442 WE 

in one row of corn, while the man he hired hoed and mopped his 
brow right beside him in another. iVny time an employer 
stopped hoeing or mopped his brow too long the employee had 
his eye on him. With an employee looking on in that way, of 
course, it cost an employer twice as much to mop his brow as 
it would now. He had to pay for a mop for the employee, too, 
while he was doing his. The employee knew the man he was 
working for and he believed in him or he didn't believe in him 
according to the facts, and he knew the precise value of what 
he was doing and how he had to work to do it. Being an em- 
ployer consisted in those days in making a man three feet away 
doing the same work you were doing understand you. 

It does not take a great artist to do this. But sitting as 
the average employer has to at a polished mahogany desk with 
not even a piece of paper lying on it, and making the man he 
hires to help him^ — -the man who is not ever even allowed to see 
the desk — see how hard he works on that mahogany desk and 
believe how hard he works on it, and give his employer credit 
for what he does with that mahogany desk as if it were a turning 
lathe, thank him for it, and let him have his pay for it, this 
takes a great artist, with sixteen secretaries. And even the 
secretaries — not more than one or two of them — will really un- 
derstand. 

Democracy and machinery between them have soddenly made 
being an employer the most exposed, difficult, and strenuous 
occupation known to man to-day. Democracy has knocked 
both ends out of being an employer, and the sides, so that an 
employer has to make everybody around him understand him. 
Machinery has knocked the bottom out of being an employer, so 
that he has to make the men who are under him understand. 

This is what I mean by the education of employers. I have 
watched the labours of my friends, the inspired and semi- 
inspired millionaires, their wistfulness toward senators national 
banks and labour unions, and I can only say as a kind of spe- 
cialist or supposed expert stander-by to inspired millionaires — I 



NEW EMPLOYERS AND NEW SALESMEN 443 

can only testify that the really great successful-looking em- 
ployers I know to-day are the most humble men we have in 
America, wondering if they will ever get before they die a fine 
comfortable rosy feeling of being educated. 

I can only say of the typical great employer to-day as Csesar 
said of Cassius: "Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look." 

There are four groups of people to whom a great employer has 
to express himself, before he can hope to get anything done. 
Every day of his life is spent in working out some problem of ex- 
pressing himself to these four groups of people. What are the 
words and what are the actions he can think of that will make 
them understand what he is trying to do and help him do it.^^ 

The first men he must express himself to are the men he must 
persuade to create and supply values — the inventors of his 
product. 

Second, there are the men he must persuade to supply capital 
for his product — his stockholders. 

Third, there are the men he must persuade to manufacture 
the product — his employees. 

Fourth, there are the men he must persuade to buy it — the 
customers. 

Of these four jobs of persuasion a great modern business 
man has to undertake, each calls for a professional expert in 
human nature. The modern business man either has to be all 
four of these professional experts in human nature himself or 
he has to be an expert in persuading four other men to be expert 
for him. The man who is a professional expert in making a 
banker do as he likes will generally make a great inventor flush 
up angrily and walk out of the room in three minutes, and a 
man who is a professional expert in getting great cities, or hills 
and valleys of people to buy his factory goods, if he tried to be 
an expert in making his factory workmen work, would make 
them strike in a week. Bankers and inventors, manual labour- 
ers and ladies reading the Ladies' Home Journal, or going past 
counters, all call for different technique, but they are all per- 



444 WE 

suading jobs, and all call for a profound, patient skill in chang- 
ing people's minds, in making men and women over before 
their own eyes, in making them the way they never wanted to 
be made until they saw us, so that they will want the things we 
want them to want, and do the things that we want them to do. 

In other words, a great business man to-day is a great engi- 
neer in the wills of other men. 

There is but one way to be an engineer in the wills of other 
men. 

The engineer in other men's wills is the man who can get their 
attention and hold it. 

This narrows us down to our definition of what a great busi- 
ness man is to-day, in this age of machinery and democracy. 
The great business man is the business man who can attract 
and grasp the attention of the other man, who can hold the 
attention of the other man for forty years, who can hold the 
attention of the other man in the hollow of his hand, move it to 
the right or to the left, toss it up or down, who can put the 
attention of the other man in his pocket. 

Business is the most masterful and most profound of all the 
professions because it is the art of picking out actions and find- 
ing words that touch the imaginations and possess the lives of 
men. 

I hope I have made, in this chapter, being a big business man 
look difficult. 

I hope I have made being a big business man so difficult in 
this chapter that anyone will see that really great men — men 
with really noble powers of putting themselves in the place of 
other men, men with big permanent motives, men with the long 
reach and with the under hold on human nature — will be the 
only men who can stand any hope of dominating American busi- 
ness life. In a revolutionary age, in an age of imperious team- 
work and machines, an age of imperious democracy and of 
asking others, it is the men who say "We" that shall alone be 
masters of our daily life, that shall alone determine the expres- 



NEW EMPLOYERS AND NEW SALESMEN 445 

sion on the face of the nation, that shall alone paint upon the 
canvas of a world the portrait of our people. With business men 
like this dramatizing an America that nobody wants to fight, 
Congress would want to calculate our amount and kind of mili- 
tary preparations on an entirely new basis. Our expert national 
strategists and expert national dramatists would be consulted 
together. 



IV 

THE NEW NATION'S WAY 

When a woman shouts to her four-year-old boy out in the 
yard as I heard one yesterday and tells him, with a truly 
impressive anger, to come into the house or she will come 
out and skin him alive, all she has to do to control her terrific 
anger is to begin to get her knife out of the drawer in the kitchen 
table and sit down and consider where she will begin taking 
the skin off first. The moment people begin dramatizing ideas, 
they know and make everybody else know just what their ideas 
are. 

This is as true of nations as of men. 

All unfairness on the part of one nation to another is due to the 
momentary paralysis of people's power to dramatize the interests 
of other people in their minds. They dramatize their own and 
then their imaginations give out. 

The practicable and conclusive way for the people of a na- 
tion to defend themselves from other nations is by dramatizing 
and spending the money to dramatize their own interests and v 
their own feelings to the people who may violate them, so that 
the feelings the people are going to have about their actions 
after they are finished can be presented to them bodily before 
they begin. 

The more loudly dramatic a business is, or even melodramatic, 
like a trolley, railroad, or a subway, or a department store, with 
large crowds on the stage and with immense audiences in the 
best seats, the sooner the business is bound to see through itself 
and be fair. W^hen a business sees all these people about it all at 
work on it and on seeing what it really is, looking through to its 

446 



THE NEW NATION'S WAY 447 

good ideas and seeing through its bad ideas and seeing them 
acted out with such horrible plainness, a business has to hurry 
more in being good. 

A more obscure, subtly dramatic business like making patent 
medicines can pursue its tortuous anonymous way longer and put 
off being good longer. 

The same principle holds good of business between nations. 
The moment it is made dramatic and conducted on dramatic 
principles by experts in self -revelation and experts in compelling 
mutual self -revelation, it becomes impossible for nations to find 
an excuse for war. 

All ambition or constructive genius in engineering a world or a 
nation is based on the power of dramatizing or visualizing to 
people in advance. 

If unfair dealing is based on dramatizing one's own side of a 
situation, and if fair dealing is based on dramatizing in one's 
own mind other people's side, it is obvious that the direct and 
compelling way for any nation to defend itself is by putting 
forward not the men that can shoot its ideas, but the men who 
can dramatize them. 

There are few people who if they see the interests of others 
dramatized before their eyes will override them. 

All the widows and orphans have to do to protect themselves 
from a railroad-wrecking speculator is to be around, crowd up to 
his windows and look in just as he is going to sign the papers. 
A railroad-wrecking broker will be as tender with widows and 
orphans as anybody. 

This is as true of nations as it is of people. 

The cry on the cross: "Father forgive them, they know not 
what they do ! " instead of being, as many people suppose it to be, 
a gracious and beautiful sentiment, an outburst of a noble and 
heroic feeling, was a plain statement from a man of imagination 
of e very-day matter of fact about men and nations. It was a 
plain, practical, constructive observation of human nature, and 
of a philosophy of how to get on with it and be fair to it — a vision 



448 WE 

of how to secure and of how to maintain peace throughout the 
world. 

If all the nations would cry out together next Friday at noon 
Christ's cry on the cross, the war would be broken and would 
be practically over before sunset. 

The only possible natural working basis for reconstruction and 
adjustment would have been provided and already set up in that 
cry all together of Christ's cry on the cross: "Father forgive 
them, they know not what they do!" 

All war is based on lopsided powers of dramatization in 
people's minds, and the way for a nation to defend itself is to let 
go its forts, plug up its guns, dismiss its generals, set its play- 
wrights to work, open theatres in the country of its enemies, or 
better still, as theatres only run at night, dramatize its business 
and get at all the people while they are all at work all day. 

Treaties and agreements to arbitrate will not defend a nation. 
Only artists and advertising men — dramatizers of what is going 
on in people's minds so that they see precisely what is going on in 
their minds — can protect a great nation. 



LOOK V 

AMERICA AND THE WORLD 

I 

ENDS 

1WANT as a citizen of this world, and as one who has a 
natural unstoppable interest in it the next thousand 
years, to have the nation picked out to lead it which is 
endowed by nature and by spirit to lead it best. 

I have a natural hope that my own nation will prove to be the 
one the other nations shall prefer and that the other nations shall 
most trust for leadership. I hope every Englishman hopes his 
nation will prove to be the one that shall be accorded by common 
consent, this leadership. I hope every German will hope and con- 
tinue to hope it is Germany. 

Anything England or Germany or America can do to make it- 
self the most fit among the nations, the most preferred nation to 
lead the world, will only insure, give a double triple assurance, to 
us all of a leadership to which we would all be loyal and to which 
we all could afford to entrust a world. 

Anything that each man of us can do to make his own family, 
by reason of his power or nearness to it, or his own city or his 
own nation eligible for leadership or preferred by others for 
leadership, is certainly to be welcomed by all of us as a contri- 
bution to the competence, integrity, thorough-mindedness, deep- 
heartedness of the human race and the glory and the joy of the 
world. 

There is no other way to make a planet capable and full of 

449 



450 WE 

happy people, than for each man to attend to himself, to his own j|| 
family, and his own city, and his own nation as his personal con- 
tribution to the success of the star. 

This chapter in this book, while it may be overheard and is 
willing to be overheard by other nations, is private and Ameri- 
can. It is a little family fireside talk for a nation. It is my 
attempt to express, as we sit closely together and look each other 
in the eyes, the personal self-consciousness of my people, the 
national self -recognition by us all of what America in some special 
or peculiar degree is for, and what by its location, its spirit, 
temperament and experience and inexperience it can probably 
do best in the new supreme task of team-work of all nations, 
which by the war of 1915 is thrust upon the world. 

I like to think that at least in a hundred years with its giant 
face toward the future — toward that unknown, untried sea of 
the spirit where the world is headed now — America will be 
found to be by temperament, by youth, by hope and strength 
and many-sidedness and world-representativeness, the best- 
endowed nation to be made by general consent and good-will 
of all on board the planet, the captain of the ship. 

In the meantime, in full toleration, and with our hearts full 
of listening to others, we will talk for a moment in this quiet 
chapter about our hopes and dreams for ourselves, as with a 
stretch of a thousand years before us, and all the other nations 
on board with us, we look out to sea. 



II 

MEANS 

A little while ago, according to my morning paper, Mr. Henry 
Ford — all miknowing that I was writing a book about how Mr. 
Carnegie and other people ought to spend ten million dollars on 
Henry Ford and on having everybody know how Henry Ford 
makes peace work — announced that he was going to spend ten 
million dollars himself on showing how peace works. 

It was announced that in the course of a few weeks Mr. Ford, 
after duly asking other people, would decide how the ten million 
dollars should be set to work. 

I could not help looking up from my book a minute and wish- 
ing Mr. Ford would ask me. "What if he did?" I said to my- 
self. 

Then I realized how awkward my first main suggestion for 
advertising peace would be to a man placed like Henry Ford. 
Mr. Ford would hardly be in a position to act on my suggestion 
himself and spend ten million dollars himself on advertising him- 
self. 

I saw that the suggestion would have to be saved for me or for 
Mr. Carnegie. 

But there are certain other things which, if Mr. Ford's ten 
millions were placed in my hands, I would try to arrange to do. 

The first general principle I would follow would be to pick out 
ten million dollars' worth of something to do which all the people 
and all the governments would soon be ready to do, too, and do 
on a larger scale afterward — the moment they had once stood 
by and once watched the idea — ten million dollars' worth of it 



-being tried. 



451 



452 WE 

I am going to make a statement of what my program would 
be in this chapter. 

I have already indicated, from time to time in these pages at 
certain points or landing places of thought where my reader and 
I perhaps might be ready, certain tentative programs for the 
American people to take in this crisis. 

I dare say the reader could have made this statement from 
sixty to seventy chapters further back in this book. As for my- 
self, the best I have been able to do has been to tell the story of 
the life of my mind in this war as fast as I lived it. There seems 
to be something clumsy and slow about living. Perhaps the 
reader has noticed it. 

When I look back to-day over the last nine or ten years of my 
life it almost always looks as if I might have lived them a good 
deal quicker and better than I did, as if I ought really to have 
rushed across lots to the truths in them in a week. Perhaps it 
is the same in reading a book as it is in writing it. And in the 
same way I dare say this modest little statement of what this 
})ook is about which I am just about to make in three rows of 
ideas just over the page might have been wedged bodily into the 
third or into the fourth chapter, but the words would not have 
meant then to me or to my reader what they mean now. The 
word "advertising" and the word *' dramatizing" seem like such 
weak-sounding words, jerked out of the dictionary as they are 
and used by anybody any day, idly, that they really had to have 
thirty or forty chapters apiece packed into them before the> 
would do. 

The words "advertising" and "dramatizing" would have 
seemed to make a very filmy, vague cobweb of a program to 
defend a great nation with in those first days when this book be- 
gan. As I look back on it now, and see once more those first, old, 
faint, hopeful chapters of mine descending out of nowhere on me, 
folding round me like a rosy mist — just on me and my fountain- 
pen labouring uphill to the truth five hundred pages away — we 
did not either of us know what advertising and dramatizing 



MEANS 453 

meant then. . . . Nor do we now as compared with what 
we will. 

But here is the statement I would have made in the first chap- 
ter if I could, and the one I desire to put forward, superseding 
and summing up the spirit of the others, as to what this book 
thinks America should do. 

First. We will arrange to have written, announced, and 
adopted at the polls by all the people, our American Confession 
of Faith in other nations and our faith and expectation for our- 
selves. 

Second. We will advertise this statement in every nation 
until every man, woman and child in the twelve leading 
and controlling nations shall know America's Confession of 
Faith. 

Third. We will dramatize this statement. 

We have to deal with say twelve nations: Germany, France, 
Austria, Russia, England, Italy, Turkey, Spain, China, Japan, 
Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. America will have one General 
Confession of Faith that shall be made known to them all, and 
she will arrange to have also twelve individual Confessions of 
Faith, individually addressed to the twelve leading nations as a 
national personal self-revelation of the people of the United 
States to each people, expressing our appreciation of their genius 
and our expectation of what (through comparison and criticism) 
their genius and ours can do together. 

As it is better to be concrete and not to generalize, I am going 
to express if I can, by way of expressing the spirit of all these 
working covenants, the moral, personal, temperamental back- 
ground for America's working covenant with Germany. 

I take Germany because at the present moment she seems to 
regard herself as the most difficult, because she seems to have set 
herself aside at least in her own mind, for the time being, from 
any particular thought or from any particular need of getting on 
with other nations. 

If America can express her own soul to Germany, and if with 



454 WE 

Germany's help America can express and interpret Germany's 
soul to America and to every-day American people, other na- 
tions will be easy. 

But before going on to illustrate my idea of what Confessions 
of Faith would have to be like in order to work, by sketching one 
for America to Germany, I wish to state the conditions that would 
have to be met before I am in favour myself of the program of 
covenants and of advertising and dramatizing as a means of 
self-defense which I am recommending. 

First. These Confessions of Faith instead of being like most 
national documents addressed by one nation to another, more 
or less dead and formal statements, patterns of compromises 
traced out in legal languagelessness by lawyers on scraps of 
paper, must be effective, human, and self-revealing documents. 
I place no more trust in treaties and lawyers as defending great 
nations than Mr. Roosevelt does. America's Confession of 
Faith must express in the burning words of men of genius, with 
the substance of religion in the form of literature, the prayers, 
desires, promises and vows, and mighty common expectation of 
one mighty people as it looks upon another. 

The covenant must be, by the way it puts words together, a 
huge engineering feat in mutual expression, mutual attention 
and mutual understanding. 



The other day Lissauer took back, my paper tells me, the Song 
of Hate for which Germany decorated him with the order of the 
Red Eagle. 

Of course he has taken it back. There is not an American of 
us all who knew human nature at all who did not know in his 
heart that Lissauer would take it back. Except in our most hate- 
ful moments we have known from the first, without admitting it, 
perhaps, that not only Lissauer but all Germany would take back 
the Hymn of Hate. x\ll Lissauer had to do was to face all the 
little children of Germany with it or watch his own boy out in the 



MEANS 455 

yard playing with it. He would not want it in children's school 
books. We know no American would and we know no German 
would. 

The basis of National Confessions and of Covenants between 
nations as a means of national defense is the fact that people are 
alike and really know at bottom that they are alike in all na- 
tions. This being so we merely propose to make deliberate 
national provision for acting on it at the precise critical moment 
when it does not look as if it were so. A war always ends by 
people's seeing things and doing things afterward that they 
would have seen and done beforehand if they had not had too 
many ships guns and colonels about to hurry and distract 
everybody and in most wars too, if the nation in some big, 
steadied, expert and planned way had assaulted peoples' atten- 
tion instead of shooting them in the stomach war would never 
have begun. 

In our confessions and covenants we will take each of these 
things up, item by item, and advertise our understanding to 
others, and the understanding of others to ourselves, until there 
is nothing to fight about. The details for specific purposes could 
be written by lawyers, but the General Confession should be 
written as a masterpiece in the heart of a nation, as a master- 
piece in expressing the great daily working emotions of the 
people in expressing the spirit of colossal international courtship, 
or of love letters between nations. The confessions should be 
conceived and be written as big beliefs, as creeds, as hymns, 
as songs of two mighty peoples which they hum to each other 
while they work. 

Out of the speechless tragedy from which the dazed nations 
are presently coming, the confessions shall be written. The 
free breath of religion shall be in them; they shall be treaties that 
shall be chanted in churches, that shall be lifted up on the voices 
of men and sung in the streets. 

Treaties that are not litanies will be scraps of paper. Treaties 
which have faith, and exaltation of spirit, which express the per- 



456 WE 

sonal feeling of each American man to the other men in other 
nations will alone be practical, because they alone will have the 
attention of the people. 

This is the first condition of my program of national self- 
defense — a supreme national self-expression. 

The second condition is that this statement of America's Con- 
fession of Faith in another nation — in Germany for instance — of 
criticism and hope toward Germany and of cooperation with the 
German people, shall be placed in the hands of the world's best 
experts in touching the imaginations of one nation with another, 
and that having been duly backed with an appropriation as large 
as is ordinarily used for armies and navies, it shall be made the 
centre of a great advertising campaign, a great assault or en- 
gineering feat of one nation's getting the attention and holding 
and using the attention of another. 

We will announce in every German city, village, farm and 
fireside, to each German, our American faith and our American 
will toward Germany. 

The third condition is that we will not only advertise this faith 
to every man in Germany until he wants to believe us, but we 
will dramatize it to him until he cannot help believing us, whether 
he wants to or not. All Germans, as a matter of course, and 
all in the day's work, by the way we daily buy their things from 
them and the way we daily sell them ours, shall believe in the 
good-will and faithfulness, the steadiness of heart, the under- 
standing and the will to understand that they have daily found 
in the American people. 

I would spend Henry Ford's first ten million dollars in picking 
out and employing three types of experts and men of genius — the 
men who can make in America a commanding statement of how 
the American people feel toward other nations and toward them- 
selves, — the men who have the technical gifts for advertising this 
statement in all the nations so that all the people of this world 
will know it and want to believe it, and the men who have the 
genius, the gift of discovering ways of dramatizing this statement 



MEANS 457 

and of acting it out so that all the people of the world will be- 
lieve it, whether they want to or not. 

Mr. Ford's ten million dollars could be spent on a ten-million- 
dollar working model, a provisional, experimental exhibit before 
the people of how confessing a nation, advertising a nation, and 
dramatizing a nation could be made to work. 

The moment the Government saw how much better nation- 
confessors, nation-advertisers and nation-dramatizers really 
worked in defending the nation, and how much better they were 
understood and liked by other nations, than generals and ad- 
mirals, and how much more useful and revealing and to the 
point, they were than generals and admirals, the American peo- 
ple would take them over, and the American nation would have 
arrived at the kind of preparedness at last that goes with her 
institutions, her gifts, and her desires, and which would lead 
all nations to fear, love and respect her and swing out with her 
into the ways of peace. 



LOOK VI 

AMERICA AND GERMANY AND THE WORLD 

I 
GERMANY AND AMERICA 

IF PEOPLE in other nations could all suddenly be more 
like the typical German in one regard, we would see our 
way out of our world-muddle in a month. 

The typical German, if he has to make a choice on any given 
day between neglecting his own personal business and neglecting 
the city's business, naturally and as a matter of course and with- 
out any nobility or sentiment, puts his own business one side and 
attends to the city's business first. He argues that the ship his 
business is on — its springing a leak and going to the bottom or its 
not going to the bottom, is of more interest to him than his business. 

In the same way that he puts his city before himself, he puts 
his nation before his city. 

If the typical German did not stop here, if he put the world 
before his own nation, Germany would be without trying the 
world's greatest nation. Germany would be immediately the 
world's freest, safest choice to be placed in the leadership of all 
of us. 

The terrific force all the world is heaping itself together 
to fight to-day is Germany's arrested idealism, the amazing 
spectacle of the terrible force of disinterestedness, of the arrested 
disinterestedness of the German mind. What the German 
genius for losing the smaller interest in the larger one would do in 
the world to-day, if each German was possessed to give himself 

458 



GERMANY AND AMERICA 459 

for a world as he is to give himself for his nation, is beyond a 
world's computation. 

Germany, instead of swinging its disinterestedness out and 
using it to surround, possess, and serve a world, has turned its 
genius for disinterestedness in — is using a big power for a little 
purpose, and is doing all it can (under its present influences) to 
commit suicide with one of its own virtues. 

Why is it that it has taken a whole planet heaped up against it 
and throwing itself upon it to-day to hold Germany at bay? 

It is because the We-spirit and the genius for team-work has 
risen to a climax, to an acceleration of self-consciousness in 
Germany which no nation has dreamed of before. 

It is the goodness in the German to-day which is making 
Germany terrific. We are all learning it. Every nation of us 
on the whole heaped-up planet as we throw ourselves upon her is 
learning that the next thing ahead of it to do is to be more like 
Germany than Germany is. Each nation day by day is having 
it set out plain before it once for all during these vast experi- 
mental months, that its only possible way to be great is to take 
over the team-work idea which Germany has discovered and 
which Germany has used for Germany, and use it for a world. 

We are learning that this goodness, this pent-up We- 
spirit in Germany which has been congested, over-specialized 
and stopped short (stopped short by not including the world con- 
sciousness), has become an acid eating out her vitals. We are 
learning that this virtue of a great nation, this virtue run mad, 
this virtue turned into a fever, once turned outward, and once 
allowed unchoked to take for its field all the world, is going auto- 
matically and of itself to make each nation live for all nations and 
all nations live for each nation in mutual self-defense. 

The death-throe of team-work against a world is the birth- 
pang of team-work for a world. 

Team-work in Germany by proving what it can do against a 
world, is proving what team-work can do and will have to be 
arranged to do in behalf of a world. 



460 WE 

The most stupendous advertisement of team-work that could 
ever have been conceived — an advertisement which has to-day 
gathered the whole world into one great audience, and made it 
listen to team-work for a hundred years — has been thrust up- 
on us by this struggle of a planet with "the first nation that ever 
said "We." 

It is because Germany, the first nation to ever say We, said 
We merely to herself, that she is being fought by a world to- 
day instead of being asked to lead it. 

So far as we are concerned, the first nation to say We has 
not said We. "We" will yet have to be said to us. Big as 
the German We is, and bigger than ours in individualistic na- 
tions as it yet is, everybody is seeing what this great self-devoted 
German We is — a mere provincial, home, one-nation-sized 
we, a huge German I sprawling across Europe. So now it 
has come to pass in the fullness of time that Germany, the first 
nation to say We to itself, is the last nation that shall be 
allowed to say I to us. 



II 

AMERICA AND GERMANY 

I have stood by and watched in the streets of Germany yellow- 
haired boys and girls going to school. If I had my way I would 
have taken them, say, every fourth boy and every fourth girl, 
and loaded them on Atlantic liners and scattered them carefully 
— a thin veneer of German children — over the whole United 
States. 

I would then come home and watch them going to schools in 
Boston, St. Louis, Minneapolis and Seattle, and to district 
schools in Vermont. 

Then as I went about in Boston, St. Louis, Minneapolis and 
Seattle, and the district schools of Vermont, and watched every- 
where the American boys and girls flashing through the city 
streets, or running along the lonely country roads to school, I 
would take every fourth boy and every fourth girl I saw, picking 
them out carefully and thoughtfully , send them over to Germany, 
plump them down with German boys and girls and German 
ideas and German teachers and parents and keep their little 
minds simmering there, in the middle of Germany, three years. 

Then I would have the American children sent back to America 
to help make America as great as America would be bound to be 
if we swapped faults with Germany, and I would have the Ger- 
man children sent home to help make Germany as great as Ger- 
many would be bound to be if Germans swapped faults with us. 

At least every fourth American needs discipline and every 
fourth German needs liberty. 

The only way to put discipline and liberty together is in self- 
discipline. 

461 



462 WE 

Germany and America both believe at heart that discipUne 
and Hberty belong together, and they both believe theoretically 
that self-discipline is the most efficient and powerful way that 
discipline and liberty can be put together, but the German 
characteristically begins at the discipline-end to work toward 
liberty, and the American begins at the liberty-end to work 
through to self -discipline. 

A great many million Germans and a great many million 
Americans die before they get through, before they can make the 
round trip and live truly powerful lives and finish off a truly 
great nation. In both nations we go down to the grave, millions 
of Americans, millions of Germans, with the faults of the end our 
nation begins on. 

What is in the foreground of a German's mind as he lives his 
life — the sense of discipline would make an amazing back- 
ground for America to work against in finding her true liberty, 
and what is in the foreground of an American's life, the sense of 
personal liberty, would make a great background for a German 
to work with in coming into his own and — in coming into a dis- 
cipline that would mean more to himself and make him mean 
more to others. 

The greatness of each nation — of Germany and of America — 
consists in mutually expectant criticism and mutually expectant 
absorption of the faults of the other. 

As water seeks its own level, and as men and women in the 
world shall forever and ever be drawn together, the mutual 
absorption of opposite qualities in nations is the law of self- 
preservation and the secret of power. 

It is pitiful to present loving one's enemies as a duty. It is the 
implacable passion of existence. It is the permanence, exuber- 
ance, and masterfulness of all leaders of men that they crave to 
absorb, act and interact upon the qualities of their opposites. 

Enough German faults will land an American boy in the White 
House, and enough American faults properly arranged for Ger- 
many to-morrow morning would give Germany in twenty years 
the leadership of the world. 



AMERICA AND GERMANY 463 

Loving one's enemies, following up the clues of one's dislikes, 
until one at last learns something, until one at last accumulates 
enough raw material for a personality, so that one can gradually 
begin to put some of it together and be somebody, and swing 
one's self out into being a whole human being instead of a fraction 
of one, is not a thing that any man or any nation should be teased 
into. All that any real man in any true nation is going to have to 
do is to take one real look at the knack of loving one's enemies to 
covet it. Loving one's enemies instead of being stated as a kind 
of wood-and-iron precept, or put forward as a religious extra, or a 
spiritually decorative idea, is going to be put forward for people 
everywhere as a plain sensible economic law, an every-day, ordi- 
nary provision any man or any nation will have to make for 
having a sufficient quantity of joy and understanding and 
spiritual vision to have the mastery of the material world and 
to have a rich, sustained, impregnable and powerful life. 



Ill 

WHAT MAKES A NATION THINK 

There are two devices or arrangements for having brains that 
nations are Hkely to find especially convenient and useful at a 
time like this, when they are beginning to feel (as nearly all 
nations have to this year) that probably they have none. 

The first principle of making one's self think is detachment or 
putting one's self in the place of others. 

The thing that keeps most nations under in this world and that 
keeps them from thinking freshly and powerfully is the fact that 
the only exercise they ever allow themselves in thinking consists 
in thinking of themselves. Of course this limits their practise a 
good deal. 

1 am writing this chapter on an island where I like to spend the 
summer, twenty miles out to sea. 

Last night, sometime around the wee small hours, I found my- 
self lying awake. The sea was climbing up the rocks out in the 
yard and the wind, hundreds of miles of it, was making great 
lunges at our little house. And I fell to thinking (possibly it 
was my supper) of how a lobster way down on the still floor of the 
ocean, protected by all those tons of heavy water, would feel 
about a storm. 

It began to come over me how it all probably was about 
lobsters. I imagine one would never really catch a lobster 
watching a storm. 

There the storm is, of course, seventy feet up, superficially 
rumpling the top of his water, and he says: "What has that 
storm to do with me? What is there that I am going to get out 
of watching that storm?" 

464 



WHAT MAKES A NATION THINK 



465 



Poor fellow ! Any man could tell liini. In fact, any animal a 
little higher up in sea circles could tell him. Gunners and 
herrings know. Even an especially thoughtful lobster almost 
knows, and in that first flash of a second, when he feels himself 
boiling in the kettle, it passes over him (all in that lightning 
flash as with people in drowning) that there must be something 
in life he had not thought of, something he had missed or over- 
looked or he would not be there. 

If the lobster had had a disinterested, curious pleasure in 
looking up from his eternal gobbling and noticing for one little 
minute of unselfish appreciation what a really tremendous im- 
pression the Creator was producing on the top twenty feet of his 
water, on the establishment in which he lives and gets his living, 
the lobster would not be obliged to end his career by spending 
his last few hours in a miserable little lath jail at the bottom of 
Creation and in being boiled in a kettle the first minute he is 
allowed at the top. 

If a lobster had the habit of occasionally looking up, and in a 
kind of generous, big way, noticing something that he personally 
was not going to get anything out of at the moment, it would 
come to pass that, when in the course of events he at last found 
himself in a lobster pot wondering how to get out, it would hardly 
take him three seconds (once having the habit) to look up 
eleven inches, see the door standing wide open and amble grace- 
fully away. 

Perhaps there are people who have never seen a lobster pot. 
It is something like this : 




466 WE 

The lobster-pot stockholders and owners know that while 
lobsters crawl up, they never look up. They know that, if they 
arrange an inclined plane, the lobster can be relied on to crawl up 
by inches to the grand entrance to the pot, drop in softly, and 
help himself to what he wants on the bottom. Then, of course, 
as the bottom of a thing, the low-motive part of it, is the only 
part of it he has ever looked at, he tries all the rest of his life to 
get out on the bottom, while all the time, as plain as day, eleven 
inches up, is that great, wide, round door standing open to the 
sea. 

This principle does not merely apply to lobsters. 

The main thing that has interested me for forty years has been 
the quarrel between capital and labour, the question as to how 
labour could get out from under capital. This question, having 
been suddenly interrupted by the quarrel between nations, has 
now been superseded in my mind by the question of how one 
nation can get out from under the other. Of course it has not 
taken me long to see that these two questions are really but two 
forms of the same question. For forty years I have been going 
about and seeing everywhere thousands of factories, thousands 
of those huge, windowed lobster pots set up in the lower levels of 
our cities, and I have seen workmen, swarms of workmen, who 
have got in and who want to get out, all trying to get out at the 
bottom. They are trying to get out by just looking at what 
they want at the moment for themselves. 

I have come to the conclusion that there is not going to be any 
bottom way out in our factories. Not until our workmen of to- 
day begin looking up are we going to get out of trouble. It is 
this old monotonous thoughtless crawling along and pegging 
away without looking up that keeps our workmen and nations 
under. While modern employers and modern ruling nations are 
far from being what they ought to be, as long as they look up 
more than we do, so long will we have to ask them what is there 
that they see and that we do not, and so long will we have to do 
as they tell us. 



WHAT MAKES A NATION THINK 467 

The thing that labour unions that feel held under and nations 
that feel held under, are going to do next is to stop butting away 
in a stupid I. W. W. fashion on the bottom of the world and look 
up instead. The held-under workmen are just at present further 
along perhaps in seeing this principle than the held-under nations 
are. Anyone can see at least in our better factories everywhere 
in America how the truth about this is working into the Ameri- 
can mind. Our American working class is already getting so in- 
terested in looking up, in studying what the employing class 
which is over it is like, and what it might be like, and in studying 
what the people need and what all other classes need, that they 
are going to save their own class by supplying what all classes 
need better than the employing class can supply it. They are 
getting ready to supply, in fact, out of the employees themselves, 
if necessary, an employing class for which the world to-day, as 
anybody can see, has already put in its order. 

This world is made without any hole in it at the bottom ex- 
cept the grave. 

The only holes in Nature, whether provided or thrust in, are 
holes like those that the seeds make, like those that are pushed 
through the cold ground by asparagus, or by crocuses, oaks, 
pansies, all living authoritative things, tulips, dandelions and 
volcanoes. Everything that has a right to express itself in this 
world, staves in the hole it expresses itself through at the 
top. 

Nobody is going to object very long to-day because labour is 
staving its holes. 

If the I. W. W. to-morrow was to begin staving its hole at the 
top, at the one place where a real hole can be got through; if the 
I. W. W. would begin making labour think and look up, would 
begin making labour efficient enough to take the places of the 
employers we now have; if it would stave up through them and 
make better ones, nobody would object to the I. W. W. 

The moment labour, instead of butting around with its eyes 
shut, on the bottom, begins staving its hole at the top, staving 



468 WE 

its hole up through the employers, all the best and most powerful 
employers in the world to-day will help it. 

The moment a nation, instead of butting around with its eyes 
shut, on the bottom of things, and in the material muck of things 
it wants for the moment and wants for itself, begins staving its 
hole at the top of the world, all the best and the most powerful 
nations in the world to-day will help it. 

The world is quarrelling with Germany to-day because Ger- 
many has aimed her hole too low. 

Itis because there is too much in Germany's hole about herself. 
It is because it is a one-nation-sized hole in the world Germany 
is trying to make that she is having such a hard time in making 
it. And when she calms down a little and gets out from under 
the scared generals who have driven her into an almost insane 
congestion or paroxysm of self-defense and of self-interest, there 
is no one that will be quicker to criticise the German hole than 
Germany herself. 

The lines of procedure upon which one nation is to get out from 
under other nations or upon which one class is to get out from 
under other classes, are implacably drawn in the modern man's 
vision of our cooperative, organized modern life. The nations 
are going to find their places in the new and better way as the 
classes in the nations are already finding theirs. 

No one class is ever going to be able to stave a hole through 
this world, from this day on, if it cannot show it is doing it in the 
interests of all of us and in an essentially disinterested way. The 
class that is disinterested first is going to be believed in first. 
And the class that gets believed in by other classes first, will 
naturally be the class that looks up from its own work and from 
its own point of view the most, and thinks of the other classes 
and understands the other classes the best. The next thing 
labour is going to fight for is the right to think of others. The 
next thing each nation is going to fight for and fight with, and 
hold its own with, is its genius for thinking of other nations. 

Even if all that nations want to-day is to get what they need 



WHAT MAKES A NATION THINK 469 

for themselves, they will have to think of others to get it. They 
will have to be disinterested. They will have to study those 
about them and above them. They will have to look up. 

As I have said before, this world is a world without any hole at 
•the bottom except the grave. 

Disinterested men and disinterested nations are going to run 
the world. The nations that are really interested in the world 
will be driven to run it. A world conducts itself like any other 
thing in nature, when it is being run. The people who are the 
most interested in a world, and who are most in the habit of 
noticing it and gearing their lives to it, get control of it. 

Because Germany is holding her labour down the world is now 
trying to hold Germany down. 

A nation that is professionally engaged in holding down one of 
its own classes, and in keeping under even its own people, cannot 
be trusted to be placed in the leadership of the world, and of the 
interests of other people besides its own. 

It is as necessary for a world to be provided with leader-nations 
among nations as it is for a country to have leaders among men. 

The nation that succeeds in giving a chance to its labouring 
men for a noble self-expression first will be the nation that shall 
be selected by all of us for the industrial, political and material 
and spiritual leadership of the world. 

The nation that shall first develop its creative inspired million- 
aires or employers, that shall therefore be first in a position to 
command loyal, big-hearted or essentially inspired labour, shall 
lead the nations. It shall loom up among the thoughts of men 
in a hundred years — shall make itself at once the great central 
Market Square of the world and the Cathedral of all men's souls. 



IV 
WHAT MAKES A NATION WORK 

There are two gears of team-work or of We-efficiency a nation 
can adopt. 

One is a low-gear or military gear and is based on having one 
set of men say what other men are for and ordering them to fit 
into what they are for, whether the men see it is what they are 
for or not. 

The other is dramatic or high-gear and is based on having one 
set of men put themselves in the place of other men, touch their 
imaginations and their souls, their sense of freedom and power 
and let them work with a daily vision of what they are for, a 
daily working sense of their own personal power and their power 
through others, themselves. 

Low-geared team-work is team-work through propelled men. 

High-geared team-work, giving at least 30 per cent, better 
material results, is team-work through self-propelled men. 

From our point of view in writing the confession of faith we 
propose to use with Germany, we would be obliged to find some 
way of expressing our friendly challenge and our grave concern 
as to the way, as it seems to us, she is engaged (and with no one 
to interrupt her or rouse her) in solemnly trifling with the fate of 
the world. 

In our confession of faith toward Germany, in our attempt to 
sketch the foreground and background of our American belief, 
our interpretation of what we want Germany to know about us 
in return for what we hope to learn from her, we would be obliged 
to say very plainly that from our point of view Germany is mak- 
ing, under her present regime, for the time being, a very serious 

470 



WHAT MAKES A NATION WORK 471 

and threatening mistake, one which threatens her and which 
threatens us all. As it seems to us, Germany is trying to get 
a civilized state through overriding the individual. America 
and Henry Ford and others are trying to produce great states 
through the individual's developing himself. 

America and Germany will try to think this matter through 
together. 

Germany's low-gear efficiency, while it is glib and prompt, of 
course, is not really, as it seems to us, quite as wonderful as it 
looks. The low-gear efficiency Germany has chosen is a kind of 
efficiency that any other strong nation could have worked up in 
thirty years, or one generation, by beginning with babies, and by 
jerking people's lives around enough, if it had wanted to. Any 
nation that gains its unity by force would have been bound to 
forge ahead, for a time, of a democratic nation, like ours, which, 
owing to its more difficult, and its more spiritually thorough 
and more permanent method could hardly hope to have gained 
by this time its unity at all. 

We shall have to find some way of expressing to Germany our 
theory, or hope about our being an efficient nation. As it 
seems to us, America is not skipping and hurrying over people's 
souls and holding under people's wills in getting its unity, and 
Germany is. American life may or may not be a higher form of 
life than German life. It remains to be seen. In the meantime 
we do know, and Germany knows, that on general principles our 
way could hardly be expected not to take us longer, and we want 
Germany and other countries to wait to reckon with us and with 
our way in the fullness of time, and to try how it works in the long 
run. In the meantime while we are modest as to the loose slow 
way it works at the moment, or in a violent sudden military 
crisis. Nature makes us hopeful. All the higher forms of life take 
longer to develop between conception and birth than the lower 
ones. 

While we have to admit we have not finished off, in America, 
as many Henry Fords as we might, we have already made one 



472 WE 

point with our method. We have proved once for all to our- 
selves, in Ford's vast experiment station in Detroit and in a 
thousand smaller and less known ones, that an organization of 
self-propelled men can do a third more work in a day than an 
organization of propelled men can. 

While nothing on earth apparently will persuade Henry Ford 
to put self-starters in the Ford car, he has put self-starters into 
all his men, and the result is an efficiency that America most 
earnestly wishes the iron-levered Prussian minds, swinging out 
into control of Germany to-day, would take note of in time. We 
think it can be shown that Prussian efficiency, based on in- 
dustrial-military genius and on ordering men about and on 
jamming men down into their places, must result in Germany 
as it does in America, in hordes of plodders, that it cannot but 
stop short of producing the highest quality and amount of work 
among labouring men, and we believe that Ford efficiency, based 
on dramatic genius, on imagination about men, and on drawing 
men out, gains inevitably the most tremendous material result. 
The present momentary disadvantage of the rest of the world, in 
its huge, believing, sprawling, adolescent, hopeful, tentative in- 
efficiency, as it stands in the presence of a magnificent and a com- 
pact Germany, is due to the fact that the rest of us had made up 
our minds definitely to the slow, democratic method, that the 
rest of us were trying for our higher-gear efficiency and had hoped 
and supposed that Germany was trying for it, too. We do not be- 
lieve in America, that one principle of getting work out of men 
applies to German men and another to American men. We be- 
lieve that if a soul in an American makes him do a third more 
work, a soul in a German would make him do a third more work. 
There cannot be any real difference between a soul in an 
American and a soul in a German. And it has seemed to us 
that the only way to save our souls in our modern life is to use 
them all day and pay for them all day. 

Germany, in fitting up fifty million people to work like pumps, 
can naturally get her work in a finished state sooner than Amer- 



WHAT MAKES A NATION WORK 473 

ica, fitting up ninety million people to work like springs. It 
always takes longer, and it takes a good deal of spiritual back- 
country and unused-looking territory in people, to arrange for 
springs, but springs once arranged for in a nation's life, instead 
of pumps, the national coal bill once for all is smaller and things 
go very still and go very strong and go with very little trying, for 
ever and ever. 



REVOLUTION AND AUTHORITY 

I have been studying the appeal that the people of Germany — 
seventy million Germans at home — have been making from day 
to day these past months to the ten million Germans in America. 
It has seemed to have sometimes a kind of wistfulness in it. 
*' Why did we let you go? " the Germans over the sea seem to say 
to the Germans wrought in with us here. "Why did we drive 
you away.^ We need you!" the seventy million seem to say to 
the ten million, to Carl Schurz and to the spirit of Carl Schurz, to 
thousands of other tremendous Americans from Germany who 
have been busy on this side of the sea day and night out-Amer- 
icanizing America since they first came over from Germany 
in '45. 

The same thing that happened to the Catholic Church (thanks 
to Germany's first and most noted American, Martin Luther) 
has seemed to many Americans to be happening to Martin 
Luther's country. It is the same policy that Germany has of 
appealing to authority and obedience instead of appealing to 
vision and will which has taken the millions of the world's most 
creative men in every nation and deliberately, age by age, forced 
them to emigrate from the Catholic Church, never to return. In 
every nation of our modern world we have been obliged to stand 
by and watch the Catholic Church being shorn of her spiritual 
greatness, giving up more and more her spirituality for her 
authority. Because she has amputated her creative men she has 
specialized in uncreative men, and her former prestige of spirit, 
of imagination, the glory of her power in the material things of 
the world, which the world's creative men, if she had let them 

474 



REVOLUTION AND AUTHORITY 475 

stay with her, would have everywhere laid at her feet, have been 
taken away from her. 

I never come out of my own little painfully modern, local, un- 
willingly protestant Congregational church where I go from 
Sunday to Sunday, and meet the Catholics pouring down the 
Elm Street hill, without wondering about them, wondering why 
they will not let me . . . why I will not do to worship with 
them. From week to week in other cities, everywhere, I go by 
and look up at their towers in the streets with grief and loneli- 
ness. I am always thinking of it with every new Catholic I 
meet. Why is it his church government will not let him worship 
with me? What is there that either of us could do or could say 
so that we could lay our little differences one side a minute and 
say a little prayer together.^ 

Of course it seems to me that it is the Catholic Church that is 
wrong in not letting me pray with it. It has seemed to me that 
it is bad for the church and for me. The church tells me that if I 
insist on having my freedom I must take it outside and have it 
there. So I have. 

I know there must be millions of Catholics who would respond 
to what I am feeling as I write these words. And I know there 
are hundreds of Catholics in high office in the government of the 
Catholic Church in America who are in favour of having a kind 
of loophole for salvation made for me and for my honest 
but loyal disagreement with the Church, while still for- 
mally outside its walls. It is because the American Catholic 
Church is wrought through with a newer, more western, more 
hospitable spirit toward the people around it in other folds than 
its own, that the Catholic Church is already more powerful in 
America to-day than in any of the older nations. 

The other policy or the policy of more marked authority, of 
more severe intolerance and exclusion, which has shorn the 
church of its power in the older nations, and which has cut off* 
or turned away its creative men and its masters of the present 
and the future of nations, is precisely the same policy the 



47G WE 

(ierman Government has adopted toward those who disagree 
with it, and it cannot but work out in the same way, losing to 
Germany the services of her men of freedom, daring, and origi- 
nahty and power. Under a regime of coercion, exclusion, and 
militarism all Germany can hope for is to narrow down 
more every year into a nation of tyrants and plodders. This 
would be as serious a loss to other nations as it would be to 
Germany. Germany knows this as well as America. America 
ought not to need to tell Germany. We only need to stand by 
her a little perhaps and hope, and remind her. And after her 
present moment of fear and madness we shall soon be watching 
her telling herself. 

In America's confession of faith, addressed to Germany, what 
we would have to arrange for is first some way of challeng- 
ing Germany to her best and freest self — some way of expressing 
our fear for her, our belief that Germany's over-discipline and 
over-repression is bound to make her, by a power of natural 
selection, send all her more creative, self-visioned, self-willed and 
mightier men to us. It is the amputated Germany living over 
here in America to-day, constituting only one tenth of our 
country, which has been helping us to at least three tenths of the 
power, the hope, the self-expression the people of America have 
won. 

In the same way, for various degrees of the same reason, 
amputated Englands, Italy s, and amputated Russias — the Carl 
Schurzes of scores of nations — deep, earnest, questioning men, 
the flower, the blossom and seed and hope of a hundred revo- 
lutions in Europe, have been cast upon American soil quietly, 
and in the sun, in the great still prairies and wide valleys, have 
grown up. 

The slowed-down, ordered, pacified revolutions of Europe 
made reasonable by hope, by good-nature, by roominess in the 
hearts of the people are everywhere before our eyes becoming 
steadfast, serene and mighty daily spiritual energies in the West. 

It is this sublime heritage from all nations which gives Amer- 



REVOLUTION AND AUTHORITY 477 

ica her unfathomed hopefulness, her resourcefulness, her con- 
scious and unconscious grip on a sane and happy world. It is 
this heritage that can fairly be said to make America to-day, 
with all her faults, the nation, after all, which is most acclimated 
to the spiritual atmosphere of the next thousand years. It is 
this that makes America to-day stand forth for the first time in 
history, in a time like this, as at once the most buoyant and the 
most steadied nation on the earth. 

I should think Germany would at least admit the trend of 
truth in what I am putting forth in this chapter as the warning, 
as the challenge, the confession and hope of my country toward 
Germany. If the ten million Germans in America were to go 
back to Germany all together in a body and settle down this 
next year, a million each in the ten chief cities of Germany, does 
anyone doubt what those ten cities would stand for in Germany.^ 
Or what those ten cities would do with the German Government 
point of view and policy that has ended in this war? What 
policy with regard to the personal lives of its citizens would the 
German Government, when it looked its ten million sudden 
Americanized Germans full in the face, be likely to see that it 
would have to carry out? 

The ten million Germans who daily stand up and that I like to 
see standing up to defend the German Government in America, 
if they were in Germany would be against the government they 
defend or would be engaged in swiftly modifying its whole re- 
pressive policy and its whole blind, superstitious treatment of 
social and democratic customs and ideas. 

Of course the German socialist is also blind and superstitious 
from our American point of view. His government crowds him 
to extremes. His present policy cannot work, because no tyr- 
anny will work, no matter whose it is. The German sociaUst is 
busy in getting ready one kind of repression just as the German 
monarchy is in getting ready another. 

The only difference is who is being repressed. 

It is at this point that our American Confession of Faith must 



478 WE 

be so expressed as to get the attention of Germany. Only the 
American method, in the end, will really work in Germany. 

The way out is not in mutual repression, but in being mutually 
self -expressed. 

The American method, once tried in Germany, of just putting 
forth a Henry Ford or so, would slowly draw Germany out of her 
national difficulty, would not make it necessary for Germany to 
take her choice, as she will have to soon, when the war is over, 
between having a Karl Marx on top of a Kaiser, or a Kaiser on 
top of Karl Marx, to subdue the country. 



VI 
REVOLUTION AND LISTENING 

The situations in Mexico and Germany shed Hght on each 
other. 

Germany is in trouble because, instead of having her children's 
diseases and revolutions when she was little, which is the safest 
time to have them lightly, she is having them in her present case- 
hardened state. She is like a lobster trying to have the measles, 
and it makes her and all the rest of the world sick. 

Mexico is more precocious. She is having her measles early 
and is breaking out all over with the self-assertions of her sup- 
pressed people. 

The whole modern democratic world, including Russia, is 
pitching into Germany and trying to whip Germany because her 
people all do what they are told to. We seem to feel in most 
nations to-day that we cannot afford to have a nation next to us 
and in the midst of us in which the common people have not the 
daily habit of questioning everything and the daily power of 
self-expression. Government for the people must be of the peo- 
ple and for its final authority it must by the people, or it will be 
inefficient in the long run, because the people will lose their facul- 
ties and their powers of initiative. 

Germany has reached the acme of team-work unity she has 
gained by employing force, by what might be called a compara- 
tively wise violence, a more or less benevolent and paternal force 
based on the need of national self-defense. The German Govern- 
ment has been allowed to attain with the people a degree of au- 
thority, efficiency and unity through the fear of her people toward 
other nations — i. e., by military necessity. Germany has had a 

479 



480 WE 

war government for iSfty years. And naturally at first when a 
war comes off, she has the first advantage over other govern- 
ments. 

Every nation in Europe has made itself for fifty years a vast 
hotbed for giving America ideas. They spring up there a little 
feverishly in a moist hotness and grow closely and madly to- 
gether. 

And when they are transplanted over here with plenty of room 
in a nation with plenty of give in it, they grow up normally, 
soberly, rather big and far-apart, fine, hardy specimens, with 
wind about them, sunshine around them, good-nature and 
hope and ozone . . . with toleration and prairies and end- 
less publicity and with long, thoughtful winters to cool them, they 
become big, quiet, and sane. The English suffragette becomes 
the American suffragette. 

In saying that Europe is a row of vast hotbeds for American 
ideas, I merely mean, of course, that the ideas are Europe's ideas 
which Europe insists on handing over to us to carry out. They 
are world-ideas. They are more particularly our ideas perhaps 
because more ideas by more European nations have been thrown 
away at us probably than at any other nation. 

"And the base things of the world, and things which are de- 
spised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring 
to nought things that are." 



VII 
THE OVER MEEK 

It is the meekness of the women of Germany which is responsi- 
ble for the present tragedy of the world. 

The meekness of the children of Germany (which is much 
more serious and dangerous for a nation) has come from i\w 
meekness of the women. 

The meekness of labour, the habit of obedience to capital, of 
taking orders from government, can be traced for its psychologi- 
cal 'background and its constant source and renewal to the meek- 
ness of the women in Germany. 

It is because the masses of the labouring men of German^^ all 
brought up in meek little flocks by their meek mothers, are so 
meek before the German Government that the German Govern- 
ment has been exposed to the not unreasonable fear of a world. 
There has had to be someone who could subdue and awe the 
German Government, and as its own people would not and could 
not, the people of other nations have felt that they would sooner 
or later have to be ready to do it. 

By the meekness of the women of Germany, one means per- 
haps not so much a moral as an intellectual quality one finds in 
them, a curious not unhappy mechanical-mindedness . The Ger- 
man men seem to like it in them — their vague contentment in not 
initiating and in not asserting the personal characteristics and the 
special points of view of women, the feminine genius and insight, 
upon the institutions customs and government of the civilization 
in which they are expected to bear and bring up the children. 

The present war which Germany entered into with such mas- 
sive simplicity would never have been precipitated, or would at 

481 



482 WE 

least have been delayed into some soluticii, if the German Gov- 
ernment had not known it could make short orders work and that 
it could whisk seventy million people into war in a day. 

It is because the German people, as compared with the people 
in other nations, could not ask questions and demand explana- 
tions, could not have a French Revolution, and because they natu- 
rally believe in authority and obedience, that all Europe has been 
plunged into war — to help Germany have her French Revolution. 

If one goes below the surface at all in judging and estimating 
a people, the first thing one always strikes which is of final and 
determining importance in a civilization is the type of woman the 
men in it like. 

To say that the German man as a rule does not seem to notice 
or to care whether a woman is interesting more than a minute at 
a time, to say that he apparently prefers to be bored and obeyed, 
may sound at first thought like a dinner-table remark but it is 
at bottom a political truth and uncovers the whole spiritual se- 
cret of the loneliness of the German mind in the modern world. 

No one can be thorough with a nation and slur over one entire 
half of it and slip gracefully past all the people in one sex. The 
amazing tractableness of the German people, which has made 
Germany one of the sudden problems and anxieties of the world, 
if we trace it to its deep, unconscious, elemental, psychological 
source in the daily life, in the blood and the milk of the people, 
will be found to lie in the daily habit the German wife has of 
monotonously, unquestioningly obeying her husband and bring- 
ing up all her little tow-headed men-children and all her little 
round fair girls with braids down their backs, to obey without 
thinking, to take naturally to authority in people, to take to a 
kind of protecting, brooding haughtiness in a government, as to 
mother's milk. 

I have heard a good deal of blame cast on Nietzsche and upon 
Nietzsche's superman for the crisis in Germany, but it seems to 
me that it can be proved that what Germany is suffering from to- 
day is not so much the superman as the overmale. 



THE OVER MEEK 483 

The lack of the touch of the woman in the ideals and the 
customs and the institutions of the country has resulted in an 
overspecialization of intellectuality and machinery in German 
culture and life. 

In most countries the duel has become practically impossible. 
And, if Germany had been personalized and humanized as other 
nations have been by the ideals and by the wills of its women, 
it would have long ago become impossible in Germany. The 
greatest tragedy of modern times turns on the fact that a great 
nation has subordinated the humanities because its women are 
not educated, are not considered worthy of education, and have 
had no practical effect on the culture, the motives and the politi- 
cal thinking of the men. 

From our American point of view there is one important feel- 
ing about Germany which our American women, and American 
men, too, will have to be sure to find a way to express in our 
iVmerican confession of faith toward Germany. From the 
point of view of our strange young bold civilization, nine Ger- 
man women out of ten are living the lives of children toward the 
men of the house. And the reason that nine German men out of 
ten, until they die, live the lives of children toward the state and 
toward their employers is that they have been borne by tractable 
mothers who have trained them all their lives into not asking 
questions and into doing what they are told, and that naturally 
they have never thought, since they were weaned, of doing any- 
thing else. As a matter of fact, as it looks in a country like 
America, German men are never (for all practical purposes) 
weaned at all. The tragedy Germany has thrust upon the world 
to-day is that politically and spiritually Germany is a nation of 
government-tamed and government-domesticated men. The 
rest of the world, which has been floundering, questioning and 
thinking, has looked on for fifty years and watched with awe the 
vast German spectacle before the world— of forty million full- 
grown men standing up full height all their lives and sucking the 
breasts of the Government. 



484 WE 

The world is afraid to-day of the German Government and is 
fighting the German Government because a government that 
does not represent the emotions, desires and the wills of the 
I)eople, which does not listen to the voices and temperaments of 
the women and children, a government which is getting to be 
merely a vast, cold, mechanical steel Udder covering half of 
Europe, has placed itself where it threatens the liberties of all 
nations, the grown men and free women and the expressed chil- 
dren of all our modern world. 

This has all come to pass because of the meekness of the 
women of Germany, because the base of the social pyramid, 
the broad mass of the mothers of the middle and lower classes, 
according to the ideals of the men and the policy of the govern- 
ment, has been deliberately allowed and deliberately compelled 
to sog down into a material contentment, into a rut of 
breeding, mending clothes, cooking, silence, and hoeing in the 
fields. 

When I think of Germany, I think of seven million men lying 
obediently in trenches, marching to death in a war in which they 
were never asked. 

I think that their mothers did it. 

I think of the mothers of eleven other nations whose sons are 
fighting these mothers' sons, and I find that daily (I cannot help 
it!) — my soul takes sides — I love the free mothers more. I look 
at my own mother, I look at my wife, I look at my daughter, I 
look at my country, and pray for my world, and in my heart, in 
this sublime struggle of the sons of the mothers of all peoples for 
the fate of the world, I cannot help (God forgive me!) praying for 
the free mothers more, praying for the sons of the free mothers 
more ! 



The war is the struggle of the nations to get one another's 
attention to what they want. The nations fight because they 
cannot get or think they cannot get one another to listen. 



THE OVER MEEK 485 

America sides at heart against the nations in which Hstening 
is harder to get. 

Other things being equal, the nation in which attention and 
the habit of getting, receiving and exchanging attention is most 
developed is the one which is most apt to be right. 

America in looking forward for itself and for the world is going 
to take sides as a matter of course with the peoples with whom 
she most belongs and with whom she can exchange the most 
mutual attention. 

The reason we are largely obliged to side at heart against 
Germany is that Germany is a nation in which attention has less 
free play, and therefore smaller possibilities of valuable and im- 
portant exchange than in other countries. 

The German people have not got the attention of their govern- 
ment because one whole half of the German race has never really 
noticed the other half. The women of German3% in distinction 
from the women of France, England and America, have not got 
the attention or swayed the habits or the ideas of the men with 
their ideas and habits, touched their imaginations and modified 
envisioned and quickened their lives. 

When the greatest nation is past and thousands of years have 
rolled away, and people have seen the nation in perspective and 
culled the lesson of its mightiest days, of its great sons, of its arts, 
of its inventions and geniuses, its songs and creeds and prayers, 
some new, strange, happy nation will build a great cathedral 
where the dead nation was, as a memorial to its mighty days, to 
its great delights, and to its wonder upon the earth. And over 
the broad front of the cathedral in vast letters that shall be 
spelled from afar shall be these words: 



TO THE 

NATION THAT LISTENED 

TO ITS WOMEN 



VIII 
THE UNDER MEEK 

I would not have anyone suppose, from this chapter, that I 
could fairly be put down and pigeonholed among my country's 
various products as one of these numerous, vague, shimmering 
iittendant males one is always seeing at suffrage and other meet- 
ings — men who put themselves down as lovers and champions of 
the New Woman. 

It is because I am so very far from being a faithful lover of the 
New Woman that I have thought that possibly my testimony, 
ground out of me by the crisis of the war of a world, might be of 
some slight service. 

I am not a flutterer about the Strong Minded Lady. 

I am testifying from out of the depths of a still left-over preju- 
dice which I contracted years ago when, one summer, having 
been duly urged, I let myself in a kind of polite unwillingness, be 
carried about to what I see now must have been a series of rather 
old-fashioned and feverish suffrage meetings. It seems to have 
been the small busy masculine auxiliary that hovered about the 
speakers at that time — a certain type of man everybody knows — 
a kind of male sub-suffragette, steeped in the souls of women, a 
pale eager reflection of brawny-minded females, and everything 
he said or did hardened my heart and made suffrage look 
threatening. 

Of course there was the New Woman, too. I do not deny that 
there is and would have to be, in many cases, much that is tem- 
porarily unlovely in the New Woman. Even now I cannot deny 
I would rather keep out of the way of one awhile, or at least un- 

486 



THE UNDER MEEK 487 

til she is a little more finished or until she gets over her pent- 
up stage. 

But my conversion is now complete. I am a suffragist if only 
because I cannot bear having to live in a world where pent-up 
women may be any minute hovering about. I have even come 
to look upon the New Woman's liberty to be unlovely if she 
likes, as one of the rights not of the women, but of the innumer- 
able men — men who have a right to live in a ventilated world. 
Most of us find it better to live in a world with women-ventila- 
tors in it. 

Of course I stood out theoretically for a long time for the idea 
that charm ought to be put first even in liberty, even if only as 
liberty's most efficient instrument, but at last I have come to see 
I am living in a nobly awkward transition age, and when I find 
I am being exposed to a New Woman, my idea is just at present 
to stand by (at a safe distance, as one would with a volcano), 
watch her erupt hopefully and wait. We ought to try to look 
upon her philosophically and as one of the vents of the world. 

In this country the New Woman seems to have to be provided 
for us or pierced through us, the way an Upton Sinclair is, or an 
I. W. W., or the way a Mr. Bryan is, as a measure of national 
precaution, not so much for what she does for us as what her 
being allowed to be a New Woman does for her. I always get on 
with a New Woman when I see her, very well indeed (a few min- 
utes) , when I think of her as coming under the head of Safety ' 
First. I try to think while she holds me close to her Idea, while 
she throws over me the lava of her wise discourse, what she is 
for, and of how her works go inside, and of how it relieves her and 
of how she lets out a country. There is at least some give in the 
country, thank God — and we are safe ! 

With this introduction I may perhaps be allowed to dwell for 
a moment longer on the economic, social, national and inter- 
national complications that can be proved to be involved in the 
position a nation accords its women. 



IX 
THE OVER MALE 

The country on this planet where the men and the women can 
feel and say We together, where the men and women can be 
truly said in some rare degree to be able to transfuse and trans- 
pose each other's points of view and each other's moods, and 
evolve, fertilize and multiply each other's characteristic ideas, 
insights and powers, can hardly keep from becoming as a matter 
of course, in a team-work or We age, the leader of all nations. 

Before nations can say We together, the men and women in 
them must. People have to have some headway in getting on 
with those who are different from them in small lots or one by 
one at home, before they can hope to get on with those who are 
different from them seventy million at a time in large bulks 
called nations three thousand miles away. 

The defect in the German culture, which has led to the whole- 
sale inefficiency Germany has shown in getting on with other 
races, in winning people and territory and governing colonies and 
in getting people to want to do things for her and do things with 
her, if it is traced back to its psychological source in German life, 
will be found to have originated and to have been renewed 
generation after generation by the over-specialized maleness and 
over-specialized femaleness of the people. 

I cannot help thinking what would happen if all the men and 
women of Germany would be so good to-morrow morning as to 
stand up in line for twenty-four hours and let one big slow wave 
or shudder of how other people feel about them pass over them. 

Of course we would have to let the wave swing back the other 
way the next morning toward us. 

488 



THE OVER MALE 489 

Then we would begin to have something to begin with for 
working out peacefully the peace of the world. History is not 
made by the facts about nations. It is made by the working 
impressions people have of the facts. I do not wish to put for- 
ward the things I am saying in these paragraphs as facts about 
Germany. I put them forward as working impressions with 
which Germany and the rest of us will practically have to deal. 

The reason that France, almost without the shot of a gun, has 
won over and made practically her own over three fifths of the 
people, three fourths of the territory in Africa, and that Germany 
has barely been able to edge in her way with foreign peoples any- 
where, is that in France women, until the day of their death, are 
(even when they are married) companionable with the men, are 
equal partners in business, equal sharers in the practical, in- 
tellectual and cultural lives of the men; and in Germany the 
woman lives in one complete world by herself under the same 
roof, and the man lives in another. It is because in France the 
woman, even of the humbler classes, is, comparatively speaking, 
a partner of her husband's whole life, that the Frenchman has be- 
come so shrewd and intuitive in seeing through people and 
making the most of people, and it is because in Germany the 
German woman does not share her husband's whole life and is 
regarded, as far as the whole reach of his larger life is concerned, 
as a kind of superior prinked-up servant or as a kind of a bio- 
logical valet, that the typical German statesman has been shorn 
of the intuitive genius and clairvoyant habit of the feminine 
mind, and falls back quite naturally on his idea that things can 
only be got out of people by force. It is because the French 
woman goes downtown with her husband, keeps store with him, 
and keeps her hand in all he thinks, puts her point of view and 
her cross-fertilization in all he says and does or has, her fellow- 
ship in all his play and work, that the Frenchman, being daily 
and intimately accustomed to be enriched and modified and 
raised to an n'^ power by the daily appropriations of the point 
of view of those who are very different from him, has become the 



490 WE 

world's master in gracious diplomacy, in adroitness and many- 
sidedness, in flexible purposefulness, patience and skill in getting 
on with people who differ with him in other races, a master in 
getting them to desire, if they possibly can, to let him have what 
he wants. 

And what is true of diplomacy is still more true of invention. 

It is because in France men and women make each other 
think, stimulate each other's minds and cross-fertilize at a thou- 
sand points each other's daily life, that the French have been 
so brilliantly inventive. Nearly all the important inventions 
in all countries have been things that men have thought of to 
save women from drudgery. The women would not have 
thought of them for themselves, but they have made the men 
think of them for them. Living closely and understandingly in 
daily touch with what is going on in the minds and hearts of 
women, men see double and do twice where otherwise it would 
have been once. What is threatening Germany and making 
Germany for the moment a kind of threat at the w orld can quite 
largely be shown to be, I believe, this curious headlong over- 
specialization of sex in thought. One seems to be always seeing 
Germany as two main conduits or tunnels of living. One sees 
the women trudging along alone, daj- after day, in the Female 
Tunnel, w ith its small skylights in it, and one sees the men living 
along day after day in the Male Tunnel, with its big skylights in 
it. . . . Then there is a third very small or bedroom tunnel. 

The plodding nature and mechanicalness of the German mind 
is due to the fact that one entire half of the German population, 
which might be engaged in quickening German men's minds, 
does not have anything to do with German men's minds at all. 
A stodgy, monotonous, headlong maleness, having once thus got 
possession of the institutions of the country, has been running it 
for fifty years all in one direction. The voice of Germany in our 
modern world has come to be a vast fog-horn of masculinity, 
mooing now at one nation and now at another nation what 
Germany wants, and we all stand by watching Germany from 



THE OVER MALE 491 

day to day and from year to year just sawing away on the world 
with one broad, flat, lonely self-assertion after the other. The 
result is that Germany has become, or seemed to become, in the 
world to-day, of all nations the nation without nerves, the na- 
tion without ears, without breasts — a splendid, man-invented 
iron machine of a country which, with its meek women huddled 
behind it, has lifted up its huge, one-sexed, onesided will upon 
the earth to roar down, to outdistance, to run down and override 
all other civilizations in the world. 



X 
WHAT MIGHT BE ASKED OF AMERICA 

I have written this chapter because I have wanted to gather 
up and express and put where it could be seen by the Germans 
and by all of us the actual feeling, superstition, or conception 
that hundreds of millions of people in our modern world have of 
German culture and of what Germany stands for and proposes 
to do with the world. 

This idea of what Germany is like may be true or it may not 
be true. If it is true, it is important to the Germans to think it 
over and to proceed in the way they think best to make it un- 
true. If it is false, it is important to Germany, and especially is 
it important to us, to know that it is false and gloriously take it 
back. 

The strategic point in the situation for America and for us all 
to consider to-day is that Germany has had to have hurled upon 
her, from the outside world, all day and all night for more than 
a year, an army of ten million men, and that she has had to pro- 
vide another army of seven million men of her own because there 
are hundreds of millions of men and women in all nations of the 
earth who do not propose to live and would rather die than live in 
the world to-day if a nation of men and women with a culture like 
the German culture can get control of it and dictate terms to it. 
Is Germany a nation who says : " France must be so completely 
crushed that she can never cross our path again? " Is Germany 
a nation which says: "We must leave the people of a conquered 
country nothing but their eyes to weep with." Or is she not? 

This question is a question that can only be dealt with by 
advertising. 

49^ 



WHAT MIGHT BE ASKED OF AMERICA 493 

If Germany can make out a good case, as she probably can, of 
not being in control of mere soldiers and of not being guilty as 
a nation of the mere male twaddle and national self-caricature 
I have just quoted from German papers, America wants to 
spend millions of dollars in telling her own people, in telling Eng- 
land and France that this idea of Germany is false; and millions 
of dollars in pointing out for Germany what Germany is really 
like. 

The best course of self-defense for Germany to take in the 
world, and the best promise she can make for peace, will be for 
her to be frank with America, make a clean breast of good and of 
ill to America, and then let America advertise to the world Ger- 
many as she really is and as she really proposes to be. 

This is why I have stated as I have, with its full force, the 
world-conception of Germany which Germany and America 
together, in Germany's behalf, and in the world's behalf, must 
cooperate to contradict. 

From a purely economic or even military point of view the 
cheapest and quickest thing that Germany could do to-day to 
get her way with the world would be to be humble, to confess 
that a part of her people, for a part of their time, have been stu- 
pendously wrong. She would then proceed to satisfy us that 
the overmale elements in German life which have done so much 
to justify the feeling the nations have, are now being put out of 
power on every hand in German life and affairs. We want 
to be shown that they are the elements Germany has decided 
are not going to be allowed to threaten Germany or threaten 
the rest of the world any longer. 

This is the only thing left to Germany to do to keep from com- 
mitting suicide, even with her success (if she is so unhappy as to 
have it). 

America's ability to help turns on what Germany does next. 

The larger measure of proud, self-contained, steadied humility, 
of confession and enlightenment about herself America is able to 
prove to the nations that Germany has, the easier is it going to 



494 WE 

be for America to advertise a Germany which a whole world will 
be proud of, sit at the feet of and forgive. 

If Germany, on the other hand, given over to the spirit of 
pride and conquest, proceeds to exacting huge indemnities or to 
annexing Belgium and France, she will be the kind of Germany 
America has stood out against believing she was. 

America's advertising among her own people and among the 
people of other nations will then have to be devoted to making 
enemies for Germany, to save a world. It will be America's only 
way to release or help release the people of Germany and the 
people of all other nations from the mad stupidity of armies, 
from the dominion of force and from the over-specialization, the 
dehumanization, the machine-energy, the machine-wittedness 
of the overmale mind. 



XI 
WHAT MIGHT BE ASKED OF GERMANY 

There is another count against Germany besides the overniale 
mind which America and Germany would need to thresh out to- 
gether before America will be in a position to help interpret and 
help advertise Germany as she is to the American people and to 
the world. It is the idea of self-defense for which Germany seems 
to stand. 

The whole subject of national defense as we see it in America 
turns in the long run on a nation's ability to deal in human na- 
ture as an art-form. The Prussian-German has got the atten- 
tion and secured the leadership of the rest of the Germans by 
using means which we are obliged to admit are apparently 
very successful with German human nature. 

The Prussian thinks that because he can get absolute sway 
over the minds and hearts and energies of Germans by ordering 
them about and by the daily use in all planes of society, of the 
habit of authority and obedience — by the use of the tone of 
superior position, superior power, by using knowledge backed up 
by superior force — that the same general tone of authority and 
superiority and force that for the time being seems to be so im- 
pressive and practical in dealing with German human nature, 
will work equally well in dealing with human nature in other 
nations. As a matter of fact, the ultimatum method, the 
habit of delivering ultimatums, which works to a charm with 
German human nature, apparently works precisely the other 
way round with Belgium and England and France and (as any- 
body can see) — with human nature in all the other nations. 

The chief characteristics of the German Kultur, in distinction 

495 



496 WE 

from others, is that it has the tone of authority in distinction 
from the tone of research and comparison. What the world is 
fighting to-day is the tone of a German with his wife and with his 
sons. All self-expression in Germany is up and down. Hori- 
zontal expression, or speaking across or speaking with, does not, 
except sporadically, exist in Germany. 

In its best as well as its worst aspects Germany is a civilization 
of fathers and sons. In America, England, and France, civili- 
zation is essentially a civilization of brothers. 

This is what the war is about. Is it or is it not better for the 
world at large that men shall get what they want out of one an- 
other by dealing with ohe another as if we were in a system of 
brothers or as if we were in a system of babies and papas .f* 

It is natural for Germany, of course, to keep right on in this 
hopeful, thoughtless way being a Fatherland to all other nations, 
and offering to be a father to everybody. But in the world at 
large, except for a year or so, or for a few minutes at a time, 
fathers have practically gone by, even in our own private houses, 
and the whole tone of life between generations, between classes, 
in the world at large is one of speaking across, of saying We, of 
being identified in a mutual expression to which each contributes 
an element and to which each contributes a measure of the final 
authority. In France and America children every day before 
everybody's eyes can be seen changing their fathers' minds and 
contributing to their fathers' mental points of view, providing 
pleasures and expectations for fathers that fathers who took a 
tone of authority would never get a chance to have. 

Fathers budge in England more slowly, but they budge. 

In France, mothers are so identified with children that fathers 
budge more, and the creative imagination, the eternal youth, 
the initiative and boldness and brilliance of the French imagina- 
tion in distinction from the German, is largely due to the 
fact that the French nation puts forward, 'encourages and 
treats as equals its women and children, and the German does 
not. 



WHAT MIGHT BE ASKED OF GERMANY 497 

We wish — millions of us in America, that something could be 
done to get Germany (in exchange for our listening to her) to 
listen to us about this. 

It is (now that the war is on) one of the things the war is 
about. 

It is one of the finest and noblest aspects of the German char- 
acter that has led to its thus being comparatively unmodern 
and undemocratic in its intimate psychology and in the subcon- 
scious assumption of the German mind. 

The reason that Germany has held out longer for the tone of 
authority and obedience than other nations is that in Germany 
authority is and has been more kindly and beneficial, more 
shrewdly serviceable, and has been held together by bigger, 
more generous motives, and has been able to have more con- 
summate abilities, in more individualized people, than Authority 
less habitually patriotic, less habitually loyal, affectionate, big- 
hearted than the German, has been able to retain in other 
countries. 

It is because in Germany the tone of authority has been abused 
less and because it has been kindly, fatherly, far-sighted, rarely 
wise, rich in sympathy, that it has held on so long. 

History turns for a thousand years on whether or not the Ger- 
man interpretation of human nature is right, or that of the rest 
of the world. 

One would be first inclined to say that the German inter- 
pretation is right for Germany if she wants it and can make it 
work. Then one remembers why we are all spending fifty mil- 
lion dollars a day on murder. 

Why is it? It is because Germany cannot discipline her 
fathers, because Germany cannot or will not put her Kaiser 
in his place, because Germany has nursed and coddled and 
petted him into being a man who regards all others as his chil- 
dren, and who would rather stave a hole in the planet or blow 
up a world than not have his way. 

With sorrow and heavy-heartedness the rest of the world is 



498 WE 

fighting for the right not to be the Kaiser's children. We want 
to be his brothers. 



I have dwelt on this point a little because I wish to show that 
it is the supreme inefficiency of the German Government — the 
inefficiency that goes with all soldiers' governments — to under- 
stand human nature, to deal with human nature, and to take 
human nature seriously as an art-form which has plunged the 
world into war. 

Entirely aside from the matter of dates and of who began, the 
fundamental fact remains that Germany got Belgian human 
nature wrong, because she was not informed how intractable 
human nature was outside of Germany. 

It is because Germany has judged the world by herself that 
we have been obliged to spend our fifty million dollars a day. 

This war is a human-nature problem and nothing but a hu- 
man-nature problem, and the first nation that makes itself 
skilled and ready to deal with human nature all the world over as 
human nature really is and as human nature really works and 
can be made to work, the first nation that studies and masters 
the art of getting the attention, mastering the imagination of 
the peoples of other nations, will be gladly proclaimed as the 
leading nation by all the leading nations of the world. 

I do not claim that this is true of the United States. 

But anything which can be said or be done to make it true will 
at least be, as far as it goes, as good for other nations as it is 
for us. No one is going to interfere with or be jealous of Amer- 
ica's being great if it is seen becoming great by understanding, 
by loving and serving other nations. 

We say Godspeed to them all. And nothing would suit us 
better, if it can, than to have some other come in first. Which- 
ever comes in first will help us or help somebody else to come in 
second, and the second will help the third. 



XII 
THE ART OF INTERNATIONAL CONFESSION 

I have tried to suggest one or two points of view which 
German and American national confessions could take up to- 
gether. A very strong German confession or frank view of our 
precisely opposite failings in America would do us incalculable 
good and afford basis for amazing mutual comparison in the 
same spirit. 

But nothing will avail either nation in the way of personal 
self-defense but mutual listening and mutual candour and con- 
fession. 

National "preparedness" prepares enemies. National con- 
fession prepares friends. 

It is the only method of self-defense that adapts itself to 
the spirit and the national methods and the innate assumptions 
of our modern life. 

When Germany stole into France in days of peace and built 
gun-foundations and forts disguised as hotels, by that one act 
of consummate treachery to modern life and to the spirit of 
modern institutions she has exposed herself to the suspicion, 
hate and organized defiance of a hundred nations for a hundred 
years. 

The more efficient Germany's hate has been, the more scien- 
tific and thorough her spy system and her distrust of her brother 
nations, the more she has heaped them up against her. 

How can America help Germany to contradict this hate and 
suspicion? The way for America to defend herself from Ger- 
many is to help her on her hate-problem. 

If America at this late date does not break away from the 

499 



500 WE 

other nations and deny that the present regime in Germany 
represents the true Germany, and deny that the German spy 
system is a true expression of the German people, America will 
miss the most stupendous and strategic use of her power, in 
behalf of a whole world, that any nation in a great crisis of 
history has ever had. America is the only nation in a position 
to make a stand for Germany and to stand out for German 
human nature by saying we are not afraid of her in spite of all, 
and that we refuse to arm against her. From the point of view 
of national and social psychology and common sense the one 
practical thing for America to do in self-defense is to appeal to 
the German people against themselves, and in this hour of the 
loneliness and fear of all nations, be forever remembered for it. 
This is best done by a statement in a masterful national Con- 
fession of Faith, addressed to the imagination of the German 
people, which in the form of literature and in the substance of 
religion expresses the soul of America to .the soul of Germany. 
This statement after it has been written by the nation's experts, 
geniuses in expressing great ideas, and submitted to the Ameri- 
can people, and after it has been duly approved and duly issued, 
and after it has been duly advertised by the nation's experts in 
attracting the attention of others, shall then be duly dramatized 
by the buying and selling and the daily actions of ninety million 
people. 

This is as definite a campaign, with as thorough a scientific 
basis, as big a financial backing, and with as definite and up-to- 
date a technique, as any humdrum general or admiral morally 
and intellectually mooning around in the last century, without 
a single ray of light in his mind as to what the modern world is 
really like, will ever worry us into with an army or navy. 



I do not find myself quite in accord with the apparent position 
of the people in the Middle States. For the most part so far 
as they are against large armament they are merely fighting in a 



ART OF INTERNATIONAL CONFESSION .501 

negative way. They are merely not interested in it. It has 
seemed to me that the way for the Middle States and all the rest 
of us to fight extreme preparedness, so-called, is not to say we 
do not need it, but to propose a substitute for half the money 
which will work twice as well. 

We will propose an army of ninety million men to which we 
will all belong, and initiate a definite campaign in which we all 
offer ourselves, our lives and our business to defend the country 
from the fear, the evil, the hate and suspicion in the world. 

While declining to get ready to shoulder guns against Ger- 
many would be possibly the clearest and best preliminary state- 
ment of our good-will and our fearlessness toward her, and 
would be our most practical first step, we can only make it work 
by following it up with an enormous, unanimous campaign of 
mutual understanding and mutual self-expression and mutual 
action, in which all our people are seen cooperating. 



XIII 
THE END OF A MILLION BABY WAR 

There is a chance for America to cooperate almost at once at 
the close of the war. Germany wants more room. If she 
adopts with America and other nations a system of defense by 
international advertising and by mutual confession, why should 
not the American people favour Germany's having more room 
and being trusted to have more room? 

A million new children every year appear in Germany. 

They look up in the faces of their fathers and mothers and 
smile and say, ''What are you going to do with us?" 

The fathers and mothers in the houses and factories and 
streets and in the shops and country fields go about wondering. 
They do not know what to say. 

Nearly every day the million new babies smile and look up in 
the faces of their fathers and mothers and say it again. 

In another short year a million more look up and smile and 
say — they say it all through Germany to the fathers and to the 
mothers, "AVhat are you going to do with us? " 

To an American it would seem simple enough. Ten million 
uncles and aunts and nephews on farms and in stores and in 
factories all the way from Ellis Island to Seattle would write 
letters and say it is fine over here, and send money orders. 

If you are a German father or mother and find yourself look- 
ing into the inquiring face of say the nine hundred and sixty- 
eighth thousand three hundred and sixty-seventh surplus Ger- 
man baby — if you find yourself looking into the face of No. 
968367 Extra, which the German Government does not know 
where to put or really see any use for . . . why should 

.502 



THE END OF A MILLION BABY WAR 503 

you worry so long as there is a great roomy country like the 
United States looking out for him and waiting for him? Why 
should anyone, even his own father and mother, worry about 
No. 968367? 

Let him laugh and cry and gurgle and tumble and sleep. 
There is room somewhere for him, and if not, he has got it in 
him — anybody can see it as he laughs and kicks to make room 
for himself. He began by making room in one house well 
enough and he will keep it up on the planet. 

This is the way an American would think of it and would 
put it to the German father and mother. 

At least I would — yesterday. 

But this morning as I sat in the train and watched Ohio and 
Indiana slip past through the window, and looked at the great 
barns and yellow harvests of the farmers and thought of the 
fields of battle and of the Germans and the French, I found 
myself thinking of the Germans in a new way. 

I had been spending a couple of days with a man I had known 
merely as the head of a great business which has dotted Russia, 
China, France and Germany and the fields of the world with 
its machines. I had never seen him with his family about him 
before. 

The little four-year-old child who ran in and climbed upon 
him spoke to him in German. As his wife was an American, 
and as he certainly was an American and had always had a 
tremendous interest in American political parties, personalities 
and programs, and had taken no small share in the most utterly 
and typically American movement in politics that this country 
has ever known, and as I had looked upon him as one of the 
masters and interpreters of all that is best in our American life, 
I was puzzled to see him talking with the child in his arms as 
if they had just moved over from Germany a year or so ago 

I then remembered that the main ideas he had stood for and 
had made his career out of were ideas he had seized upon and seen 
the American bearings of while studying in a German university. 



504 WE 

It came out a little later that he had quarrelled with his 
parents and his teachers in boyhood and had run away from an 
American school to Germany. He had turned the w^hole thing 
around, and as the German boy or the French boy runs away to a 
new country, he had run away to an old one. This was the secret 
of his power. His children are being taught German and are 
speaking it in the family while growing up, because they will have 
English anyway, and he wants his children to get as much out of 
German civilization to use in America as he had got out of it and 
used in America. He wants the German virtues wrought in, 
while they are growing up, with their American virtues. Of 
course if there is one thing in all the world that would be becom- 
ing to our American virtues it would be to have a few German 
ones mixed in with them. Even if the German virtues are bad 
for the Germans, they are good for us. 

The best way to do in getting a German virtue is to get it 
where it is made. It cannot be taught or read. It must be 
breathed. One gets it best by being surrounded with thousands 
of people who have it and who do not even know they have it. 

As I came away from my friend's house I kept thinking. I 
saw how he had made a career out of the German habits of mind 
he had caught as a boy, out of the thoroughness and honesty of 
his thought, out of his spiritual persistence, and above all out of 
that sense of soundness and well-being which he conveyed in 
everything he did. Then suddenly and without anything being 
said about it, it came over me how a German father might feel, 
possibly, with a new German baby Germany had no room for, 
looking him in the eyes and saying: ''What are you going to do 
with me.'*" 

When the fathers and mothers of a great people stand on the 
edge of a nation and see a million children a year being pushed 
off into the sea to be floated off and breathed into by strange 
civilizations, to have their lives seized by other ideals and caught 
away by other enthusiasms, one sees or suspects one sees what 
the Germans are really fighting for. 



THE END OF A MILLION BABY WAR .>0o 

They are fighting for the right to keep on being Germans. 

They are fighting for the habits of their minds and bodies. 
They do not want to be isolated one at a time and set in totally 
difi'erent human climates. All the peoples have their faults, and 
looking into a baby's face that you must send away and thinking 
that he may come home to you some day a sleek Frenchman, a 
respectable Englishman, or a glib American is not a happy ex- 
perience. 

How would we feel ourselves. f^ 

I am not saying that this point of view justifies the war. 
Germans have certainly taken the wrong way to tell us about 
their million babies a year, but the idea they are trying to get 
into us, some of them, is a right and human idea. 

The world has got to provide for those million babies. They 
are ours as well as Germany's. And we are going to help Ger- 
many to arrange for some ground on the earth — her own room — 
on which to do it when our attention is really got to it. 

She is making a desperately clumsy business of getting our at- 
tention to her million babies, but for my own part any nation 
that knows enough or is buoyant enough to have a million more 
babies a year than the older, tireder, or may I say more spinster- 
ish and maiden-aunt nations would want, has got to be listened 
to. 

When one thinks of it, a million surplus babies in a nation is 
about as neat a compliment to this planet and about as noble an 
appeal to the chivalry of the world as anybody could hope for 
from any nation. 

Anyway, there is something about it — about that million ex- 
tra babies, which if the Germans will ever stop fighting us long 
enough to let us think, will yet reach all people, and make us act 
and think like men and women again, like fathers and mothers 
again. 

Mter the roar and darkness and bitterness the Kings and 
Ministers at last shall let the little children speak, and the na- 
tions will be gentle in their hearts. 



506 WE 

There is not a nation of us nor a man of us all that can take one 
real good square look, even in a shop window, at a pair of baby 
shoes, and not think fair and straight. 



The nations are afraid to let Germany have more room because 
they believe certain things are true about her which either are or 
are not true. K they are true, Germany can undertake to change 
these things, and America will help advertise that she has 
changed them. If they are not true, America will help advertise 
that they are lies. In any event, the only practical way to de- 
termine whether Germany should or should not be trusted with 
more room is through international confession and international 
advertising. 

If Germany will advertise for more room in the world in a way 
ill which America can join, America is waiting to help her. 



XIV 
A LITTLE DOORWAY OF PEACE 

The reason people want increased armament is that they 
must have preparedness of some sort and have it at once, 
and that no adequate substitute for increased armament has 
been placed before them. 

I am placing before the people in this book my substitute for 
greatly increased armament — a stupendous campaign of un- 
armed advertising in nations we are afraid of and that are 
afraid of us — an Understanding Army for national defense in- 
stead of a standing army. 

If the people of America, as events prove, after this book has 
been out, turn the book down, and at every point stupendously 
contradict it, I am as much in favour of having the largest 
navy in the world as anyone. I should probably want a 
larger one than the President. It would take a good many 
guns to defend a people as scared as we are, a people who 
have shown point-blank that they are afraid of their own 
brains and afraid even of themselves and power to express 
themselves. 

If this is true about us, I say for one the more guns, the better. 

If I find I am really living my life out in the daily presence 
of a great unanimously scared people like this, I shall be more 
scared than any of them. 

After the proposition in this book has been before the peo- 
ple for a reasonable time one of three things will happen: 
Either the people will satisfy our President that they have the 
brains and the nerve to carry through a policy of self-defense 
by self-expression, a policy of putting up a big fight of under- 

507 



508 WE 

standing and being understood, or the President will satisfy the 
people that they have, or I will have revealed to me 
that my people are a dumb gunny -witted scared people, that 
they have no sublime wilful national self-assertion of their own 
which they can masterfully express to other nations, and that 
dynamite lyddite and poisonous gases and sneaking submarines 
can only express them. 

I am not launching forth in this book a program of defense 
for people in general, no matter what the people are like. It is 
because my program of sublime will to be understood, my pro- 
gram of advertising, is like America and goes with x\merican men 
and goes with American gifts and American ways and means of 
action, that I have felt that it could not but be in our hands an 
arresting, convincing, and stupendous engineering feat in a na- 
tion's being believed. 

If my program does not go with the American people, and if 
the people will say it does not, I shall promptly take my stand 
against it. And after this book has been before the people and 
the people have answered back and have given me a real show- 
ing of how afraid they are, one single proof of their terror over 
trying to express themselves to other nations like human beings, 
I shall favour a larger armament than the President or anyone 
has stood for yet. 

On the other hand, if, after my substitute for national 
defense has been fairly placed before the people and before Con- 
gress, the people shall say '*Amen" to it, the President will find 
himself by the sudden self-revelation of what iVmericans are 
really like the President of a new people capable of carrying on a 
new policy. He will find himself President of a people with ex- 
pressed wills, with released faiths, a nation touched with a high, 
quiet imagination about itself and about the world, a nation in 
which every man shall believe his own heart, and ninety million 
men — still, calm, fresh, rested western men at last with love and 
fearlessness and common sense shall subdue and win the nations 
of the earth. 



A LITTLE DOORWAY OF PEACE 509 

Of course, when the President finds himself the President of a 
new, or apparently new people, of a people that has found itself 
and expressed itself and that has poured out its new will upon 
the earth, he will be in a position to carry out a program of selt- 
defense that is as new as the people. 



ACT III 

FOREGROUNDS AND BACKGROUNDS OF AMERICAN 

BELIEF 

You AND I Street 

The Land of They and It 

The We Country 

What Being a Neutral Is Like 

What Being a Neutral Is Not Like 



LOOK I 

YOU AND I STREET 

I 

THE FEELING OF BEING A DOG 

THIS chapter consists of a few thoughts about dogs. 
Thought I. Anybody a dog does not feel identified 
with he hates. This, of course, results in his having to 
have two sets of principles. He has one set of principles he keeps 
for use in the streets and another set for his own yard. He has a 
looser ideal for the streets. Streets, he argues, cannot be helped . 
Other dogs and other dogs' masters have to be allowed on them. 
He makes discreet exceptions here and there, but this is his 
general idea. 

Thought II. The difference between me and my dog at any 
given minute as we stand together, say in the middle of my drive- 
way in my yard, is that he is a patriot and that I am not. The 
moment anybody appears in my yard without a ticket for my 
yard. Tomtom barks. He demands a pass. He assumes that 
there is always something the matter with people who come into 
my yard, or rather his yard, or rather, as one should say, our 
yard, without an introduction. I assume that nothing is the 
matter with people until they have proved it. Tomtom thinks 
that this is superficial in me. He never can get used to it. 

Thought III. When I sat down to write these few tentative 
thoughts about me and my dog — or rather my dog and me — my 
general notion was that I would proceed to show, in spite of the 

511 



512 ' WE 

compact that is forever sealed between us, how different we were, 
and how superior on the whole I was, or am. I was going to go 
on quietly from this to point out, in order to help clear up a little 
our current muddleheadedness about war, that what makes me 
different from my dog, and on the whole, if I must say it, 
superior to him, is that I have outgrown being a patriot and 
fighting for my own yard, and he has not. But I have come up 
against difficulties. It has just come over me, while I write, as 
I have looked down on him lying on his big red pillow at my side, 
asleep in the sun (he has stirred now and looked up to see if I am 
not through yet with this confounded yellow paper I am always 
fooling with up in my lap, to see if I am not ready for our regular 
morning run) — well, as I was going to say, as I look at him lying 
there full of trust and sleep before me and before my life, I take it 
all back. I am not different from him or superior to him. It is 
all an illusion, as it always is about my being superior to him or 
to anybody. (I know this in my bones, but I do keep forgetting 
on the outside not to be superior, or not to have superior spells.) 
Now here is the truth: the only difference between me and my 
dog, between Tomtom's patriotism and mine, is in the size of our 
yards. He says our yard goes out to the street and to the end of 
the barberry hedge, and I say it reaches up High Street and goes 
around the world. 

Thought IV. What I am trying to do in writing this book is 
just what Tomtom is trying to do. I am merely trying to de- 
fend my yard as well as he defends his. We are one at heart. 

He has just waked up this minute, put his forepaws on my 
knees and looked in my eyes and reminded me about this. 

And now he has turned back with that old, wistful, hurt, 
resigned look and is trying his other side and is settling down to 
waiting for me again. 

(We could not stand it any longer and went out.) 

Thought V. (As we ran along together down the hill.) 
Everything is in the size of the yard. All of us are alike. 



II 

THE FEELING OF BEING A FOREIGNER 

When people quarrel and look back on the quarrel afterward, 
they are apt to be quite reasonable and clear-headed as to how it 
happened. They very often find themselves having a new, 
fresh, and not altogether unhappy clear-headedness about them- 
selves. All that had really happened to them was a violent or 
rheumatic twist or bend in their perspective. For some reason 
and in some mysterious way our small differences with people 
get shoved in front of our large resemblances to them, and we 
find ourselves with a great crowd of sudden immense-little 
things looming up between us which the next morning or the 
next week in the calmest and most bewildering way become as 
little as ever. 

There are certain types, temperaments and national traits 
that human beings seem to have to come in, and there is hardly 
a man of us all who has not every now and then a curious, almost 
abysmal sense of difference with certain persons and certain 
kinds of people. 

It is not a thing that one's reason seems to have anything to 
do with. It is something akin to a superstition at the bottom 
of a quarrel. It is a kind of superstitious sense of distance that 
takes hold of one. There is the foolish way many of us feel 
about the Chinese, for instance. Ever since I was a boy I have 
lived with an immense hot chunk of earth eight thousand miles 
through and all melted and boiling in the middle, between me 
and my Chinese brothers. Every now and then, as I remember, 
a few of them have wandered vaguely around the edges of it 
and across a little low bench or counter they have peered o^'er 

513 



514 WE 

into my life. All the unimportant little things about them ever 
since I was a little child — their wide eyes and pigtails, their un- 
tucked-in shirts, and their vague and floppy feet — have loomed 
up in my imagination, and I have never had any real, solid 
knowledge of them or any real conversation or dealings with 
them beyond "Done Thursday night, please," or "Yes" and 
"No," and little ripped-out pieces of paper. 

The result is that I find myself looking at them, in spite of 
myself, furtively and as if they were a different order or kind 
of being from Americans. And this feeling we have about the 
Chinese or about any people who for some reason have come 
to seem even temporarily of a different order from us is a not 
unfair illustration of the moral basis and working basis of all 
wars and quarrels. Very kind and reasonable people the moment 
they once get it fixed in their minds that the people they are 
dealing with belong practically to a separate or private human 
race, and are not like the rest of us, become brutal and heartless 
with them. Only the other day I was struggling with this un- 
reasoning sense of distance in people. 

I sat in the car all the way up Mount Tom with a China- 
man just across the aisle. He sat with his face turned toward 
me a little, and when I got out, he was still there sitting with the 
same set far-away look, as if he were eternally going to Holyoke. 

When I sit opposite a Chinese face I always keep wondering 
about it. There seems to be something about the way the 
Chinese are made. The face on a Chinaman always looks like 
an afterthought. It's as if, after the man was all done, his 
head, his trunk and legs and the rest, a face, just at the last 
moment, had been put on to know him by, more or less as a last 
resort and as a concession to other people. It is a rather utili- 
tarian thing at best — a Chinese face is. And economical, too: 
just a slight tracery or indication of features in it, little marks or 
symbols, one side of the skull taken as it were and finished off 
a little differently, for what must always seem, to me at least, 
when I look gravely into it, some unknown purpose. The pur- 



THE FEELING OF BEING A FOREIGNER 515 

pose is deep probably, and I know in a general way that there 
must be something I do not understand; and of course I am 
speaking of Chinamen not as they are, but as they seem at 
first to people in a young flighty impromptu civilization like 
ours. They look like idols — all the Chinese laundry men do — 
idols that have just got down or got up (most idols I know are 
squatty) and are now walking around and doing things. And 
they look for the most part like replicas of the same idol. They 
all have that same nice, solid, comfortable look, as if they had 
sat thousands of years without a wink, being bowed to by 
generations, and not caring; and yet every time you go in their 
bell-ringing doors there they are, ironing your shirts, handing 
you out those funny little tickets with those nicknames on they 
know you by; and all the time you have the feeling of being 
waited on by some civilization from afar and of being served 
faithfully and dumbly by these unknown gods. 

My superstitions about Chinamen happen to be sate, peaceful 
and agreeable ones, but what if they happened to be different.'^ 

This feeling we have about the Chinese, some of us, is the 
fundamental moral basis of all quarrels. And as it is an illusion 
and is merely a matter of acquaintance and experience to remove 
it, it affords a working basis for diagnosis and the removal of all 
quarrels and of all war between nations. 

All we have to do is to get past the little outside things on 
one another that we have let loom up in front and we are at 
peace. 

As civilization like a great churn is engaged every day in 
rolling all peoples of the earth together for the first time in 
history, the nations are face to face at last with the slow, final, 
implacable peace of the world. And it is for this and not for 
war that nations that believe in Preparedness must prepare. 



Ill 

THE HABIT OF AGREEING WITH ONE'S ENEMIES 

When I was a boy, and began studying chemistry, there were 
twenty-seven elements. 

How many are there now? 

It has been found on closer examination that elements that 
looked different were alike. 

People pigeonhole each other off in the same way and nearly 
every quarrel is based on a distinction without a difference. 
WheUf there really is a difference, the difference is found to be 
a difference the people can use better together than they could 
apart and better as friends than they could as enemies. One 
wishes nations, or rather the so-called statesmen that think they 
can run nations, would consider going back to nature. People 
were intended by nature to enjoy every day the sense of being 
different as much as they enjoy the sense of being alike. Every 
man has been intended by nature to be very grateful to some 
woman for differing with him enough not to be a man. 

One of the first things people discover, as they grow older 
and live deeply and with vision and with love, is that a difference 
between people, if it really is a difference, is one of their great 
mutual possessions. It is the difference they have in common 
which makes them one. 

The power or dignity of being a human being, the perpetual 
freshness, the sense of vista and expectation of having a human 
life, lies in letting one's life be different enough from other 
lives to have something to supply to them that they want, 
and to have something to get from them and to keep collect- 
ing all one's life from them, which one was born without. 

516 



HABIT OF AGREEING WITH ONE'S ENEMIES 517 

When Christ told us to love our enemies, He was not telling 
us with a kind of sad proper look of something we really ought 
to do; He was telling us of something that would merely make 
us happy. The statement one might make that loving those 
who differ with us, after a little practice, is as interesting as a 
hotel lark, that it is the greatest, and most exciting of all per- 
sonal adventures in this world, is an understatement. 

Loving one's enemies instead of being a kind of extra flourish 
of morality or religious day-dreaming is coming to be seen at last 
as just a plain, orduiary, every-day law of psychology and a way 
of having brains and insight and of getting what one wants. 
It is such a plain, practical law of nature that one would have 
said it would hardly need to be put in a Bible at all. 

Even if the differences between nations and between men are 
there and are not mere distinctions without a difference, they 
are not so important as the resemblances and as the things we 
have and love and need in common. 

The difference the man and the woman have in one being a 
man and the other being a woman, is a trivial detail as compared 
with the resemblance they have in both being human beings. 

When people or nations fight, they either fight over differ- 
ences they would prefer to use together if they stopped to think, 
or they fight because the difference they think they see does not 
exist and is really a disguised resemblance, or they fight because 
they do not figure up their difference accurately and see what 
it is worth. In war we always miss our calculation, and because 
we have, say, one tenth of one per cent, of not resembling the 
enemy, we propose to give up once and for all ninety-nine and 
nine tenths per cent, of being just like him and belonging with him. 



Once upon a time there fell to quarrelling upon the earth 
two men, one called Up and the other called Down. Down 
began to hit Up because he was up and Up began to hit Down 
because he was down. They shut their eyes and pummelled 



518 WE 

each other all day, day in and day out. They were wild over 
not being just alike, and fought because there was a difference 
between them. 

God came along in the cool of the evening one day, stopped 
Up and Down a minute, and pointed to the stars. 

God said that there was no such thing as any real difference 
between Up and Down. Everything — Up and Down and all — 
was just going round and round and round, God said. 

Then Up and Down stood with God and looked at the stars. 

And Up and Down looked in one another's eyes. 

Then Up and Down fell on each other's necks, and have been 
doing plain, happy, modest team-work (in the air and the water 
and on apple trees) ever since. 

When God pointed to the stars and said to Up and Down, 
"Everything is going round and round," it was another way of 
saying, of course, that everything is going over to its opposite 
and coming back to itself. 

Everything in nature is loving its enemies — except us. Every- 
thing is striking up a mutual interest with differences in pro- 
portion as it is powerful and alive. In a few years after this 
war the most powerful people and nations will, too. 

Every nation that really is heard of or noticed in our modern 
world will look upon fighting as anaemic. 



IV 
THINKING IN THE DARK 

When I think of the debt the world owes to the Germans for 
singing about the stars, and of what the Germans and all of 
us owe to the poets of England for uncovering the sky above 
the earth, for sweeping it into the lives and the thoughts of men, 
I wish I could make them all — all the Germans and all the 
Englishmen — look at the stars one night together. 

I wish some night next say the night of , the six 

million men in the German army and the six million men in the 
armies of the allies, would all agree to stop fighting, and stand 
one night and watch the stars together, all the worlds up there, 
those same worlds that Germans, iVustrians, Englishmen and 
Frenchmen have watched every night together since they were 
little children — just stand and watch their worlds awhile, so 
still and powerful year after year, night after night, whirling 
around their opposites and reaching over and making themselves 
strong and steady with their opposites, and swinging about on 
their enemies as fulcrums and leaning on their enemies as their 
stays and supports. 

Then after they had looked and thought all night, if they 
wanted to they could go on killing each other in the morning. 



519 



V 
THINKING IN THREE DIMENSIONS 

There are these stages in the evolution of the hfe of a man: 

1. Saying We with one's mother (at the breast). 

2. " " " " brother. 

3. " *' " someone else's brother. 

4. " *' *' someone else's sister. (Saying We 
with a Woman or representatively with Nature — ■ 
the whole other half of a human race.) 

Then as life unfolds : 

5. We with one's employer. 

6. ** ** *' own class. 

7. " " " city. 

8. " " " nation. 

9. " " the world. 

To get a man's attention deeply and permanently one must 
first believe that it can be got, that the precise thing he has 
picked out not to see and that he cannot focus under his eye is 
the thing that he can see and is going to see as well as any- 
one. 

The screw of his attention to a subject has got to be screwed 
up like an opera glass until it stops looking like a blur to him. 
That is all. The fundamental practical working doctrine or 
basis for peace I am standing for in this book is that everybody is 
like everybody — when screwed up. 

Nine out of ten things we cannot get a man to see he fails to 
see because we try to get him with enormous effort to look at 
a blur. The average man — one new subject after another — 
will stare at a blur year after year and be angry with us for al- 

520 



THINKING IN THREE DIMENSIONS 521 

ways telling him we wish he would stare at it over and over and 
that we wish he would see how fine it is, when all the time one 
single turn of the screw of his attention, so that he really has one 
look at it, would make him as enthusiastic about it as the rest of 
us are — or anyone. 

To get a man's attention permanently to any subject one 
must turn the screw of his attention in three gears. 

There is the low gear, or I-gear, the You-and-I-gear and the 
Crowd-gear. 

In using the I-gear one must always deal with a man as if he 
were somebody in particular, the way his wife does. 

One points the subject at him I-end first, and with his own 
immediate individual self in the foreground. 

In using the You-and-I-gear the subject which we want a man 
to see as we see it must be presented to him as a type, as a mem- 
ber of a class or group of men with whom he feels directly identi- 
fied. 

In the Crowd-gear one deals with him as the latent universal 
human being he really is. One thinks and acts with him seri- 
ously and openly as having all these crowds of other people in 
him — latent people. One deals with him on different subjects 
and at different times as being potentially all sizes of a man, as a 
boy-baby, or boy-man, or man of all ages, a member of all 
classes and all eras, a brother of all religions, a citizen of the 
world. 

One should use these three gears in getting a man's attention 
or a nation's attention. If one wishes to be deeply successful, 
one uses all three gears at once in a man. To get his deep atten- 
tion, one appeals to and tries to rally and to express at the same 
time his self-consciousness, clan-consciousness and world-con- 
consciousness. 



The main difference between a good or efficient act and a bad 
act is that a bad act is superficial and that a good act is thorough. 



522 WE 

A bad act works for the moment, but if one looks back at it 
or looks forward for it, or examines it in all three tenses, one 
desires eagerly not to do it. The railroads are all sorry now they 
acted as they did twenty years ago. 

This seems to be the first test of goodness or eflSciency in an 
act for a man, a corporation, or a nation, looking at it in three 
tenses. 

The second test is in looking at it in three persons. 

What I want to say in this book is that every action is an ex- 
pression. It is a sentence dramatized. This sentence in action 
can be carried out in the first, second, or third person (singular 
or plural). 

The moral value or energy- voltage in an action culminates in 
the first person plural. Generally goodness (i. e., energy in 
an act) evolves something like this : 

One finds one's self thinking in more or less unconscious pro- 
nouns, and, as the subject gets a deeper hold on one, and one 
comes to closer quarters, one is apt to find the unconscious pro- 
nouns one is thinking in run something like this: 

I 

I, They 
I, You, They 
I, You 
You or I 
You and I 
We 

Probably the reader has noticed it. 

Take any subject and really penetrate from the outside or cir- 
cumference of the subject to the centre of it, and you will find 
that on the outside of it and the first edges of it you find yourself 
thinking of the people in it in a distant or third person terms and 
with a kind of They and It feeling, and at the heated core of it 
when you focus on it as with a burning glass before you know it 
you are thinking of the subject in We — in the terms of We. 

The movement of subconscious pronouns in a man's thinking 



THINKING IN THREE DIMENSIONS 



523 



rom the outside or circumference of a subject to the heart of it 
night be pictured roughly something hke this: 




The measure of the energy and effectiveness of a man in this 
v'orld turns on the power he has of taking every act and thought 
le has and thinking it out and working it through the three 
)ersons into the first person plural. 

In dealing with a subject he works past the fainter and vaguer 
vay of thinking of people in it in the third person plural and 
hrough the smaller, meaner, first person singular until he stands 



524 WE 

face to face with it and thinks with people rather than about 
them, and with them rather than for them, with them rather 
than to them, sees the deeper, the more universal truth and 
says We with it. 

The more a man says We in his thinking, the more he sees 
to do and the more of what he sees, he does. The measure of a 
man is the number of people he does his thinking with, the kinds 
and number of people in his life and in his business he can say 
We with. 

What applies to men applies to nations. 

The way for a nation to get the attention of nations and to 
defend itself from nations is to say We with them and say it 
first, and deeper, and better than they can, so that in their own 
interest they cannot help but listen. 

Germany tried to get England's attention by saying 
We in the way of commerce and a common use of water- 
ways and in sharing territory, and she could not do it. So 
at last Germany coming to the same difficulty with the 
Englishmen that their own wives and the suffragettes had had, 
tried to get attention by threatening England with the ruin 
of a world. 

Germany was as wrong and shortsighted and unpractical in 
trying to get the attention of English gentlemen in this way as 
the suffragettes were. But it was not unnatural, and it was not 
all her fault that she thought she had to. 

The principle of saying We which I am trying to express is 
illustrated not only by the way individuals learn to say We, 
but by the way the public learns how it works to say it. At first 
the public thinks of others as in the third person. Then it be- 
gins to say You and I and then You or I and then You and 
I. At first the Public said to the Trust: "You must divide 
with us. You must say You and I with us." Then the Trust 
began to say You and I with consumers. 

Now the Public says to the Trust: *'You must divide with 
your employees," and the Trust is beginning to do it. It is 



THINKING IN THREE DIMENSIONS 525 

merely a matter of thinking in three persons, and everybody be- 
comes fair and everybody becomes efficient. People cannot be 
divided off into employees and employers and consumers. They 
all find themselves saying We when they are thorough or 
really think their interests out. Every consumer is also an 
employee on some one thing that is made. A man's interests 
as an employee are not more important in three tenses to him 
than his interests as a consumer. He does not want lower prices 
at the expense of the employee in any industry. The cause of 
the employee's having a more than living wage in all industries 
is his cause. The cause of the employers' having a fair profit is 
his cause, too, if only to give employers a chance to keep on 
giving employees something to do. 

Any business that does not divide up and divide up fairly be- 
tween owners, consumers and workers is soon to be in this 
country in daily peril before the people. They will not need to 
legislate so very much. 

The public opinion and the public will will be expressed. 

The public will is only beginning to be expressed now in paper 
books and in votes and in the liberty it is going to give to the 
men who r?spect it and in the overwhelming bondage, ostracism 
and business failure of the men who do not. 

As the public can only become self-conscious in a book, and as 
a book is the quickest way to mobilize and gather the public up 
— a book that the public will sign its name to — I am doing what 
I can toward expressing what this public self-consciousness of 
America is in this book. If any man wants to know how 
America feels about the hold-up in business, no matter whose 
hold-up it is, I cannot help hoping this book will be left lying 
around near him. There are several chapters ninety million people 
would like to read aloud to him until he gets some inkling of 
what America thinks about him and of what America is going to 
do to him. Every man of the larger sort who does business 
in America to-day is being gripped in the We-spirit as in a vise 
by ninety million people. What is true of the fate of the hold- 



5^6 WE 

up in business is still more true of the hold-up between nations. 
Any great people that feels superior to saying We with other 
peoples will be overwhelmed by them. Any great power that 
holds up the world to-day soon slips back into third or fourth 
place in it. 



LOOK II 

THE LAND OF THEY AND IT 
I 

THE IDEA THAT A GOVERNMENT MUST NOT BE 

PERSONAL 

THERE are certain superstitions, bogies and humdrums of 
the Governmental Mind as we see the Governmental 
Mind now flourishing and now daily having its way in 
Europe, which the American people in spite of the historical 
and political backgrounds in which they have lived for three 
hundred years often share, but which America, as it seems to 
some of us, exists on the earth to-day to contradict. The first 
of these ideas which I would like to touch on for a little is the 
idea that a government must not be personal. 



Every little while up in my workroom here in Northampton 
I hear a kind of businesslike buzz on the wall near my desk and 
I wake up from what I'm doing. "That means me, probably," 
I say to myself. Then I reach out with my hand quickly, lean 
over a little, and put the city of Northampton up to my left 
ear — twenty thousand people — it may be any one of them, or 
Springfield, perhaps — ninety thousand more — or, for all I know, 
it may be any one of three million people down in New York 
I'm being exposed to in taking up that terrible, anonymous, 
innumerable little black gutta-percha Thing — that hole on the 
end of a wire — and holding it deliberately against my left ear. 

527 



528 WE 

I s^y "Halloa!" in a dull, safe, cold, gray tone — a more or less 
iron-gray tone. (I don't mind wearing my heart on my sleeve 
at times with people I have my eyes on, but I don't propose to 
put my heart on a wire here in Northampton where any one 
of twenty thousand people can tap it by calling out a number to 
a young lady down on Main Street. With twenty thousand 
people hovering around I naturally begin with the cold gray 
tone.) 

Then I hear a feminine voice. 

This chops off ten thousand at once. There are ten thousand 
men, anyway, in this town who are not in it now. 

Then I notice (while I'm being asked if I am myself) that the 
voice is not the voice of a child or of a young girl. This brings 
it down five thousand more. 

Then I hear a name and four thousand nine hundred and 
ninety-nine women of this blessed town are cut off with a breath. 
Out of all that awful unspeakable tangle of copper wires and 
female voices I had felt mixed up with, four thousand nine 
hundred and ninetj^-nine more hurry politely away and I am 

left alone with a mile of copper wire and Mrs. of No. 

377 Elm Street! 

The cold gray tone modulates into the same shade it left off 
on the last time I sat on her right at dinner or the tone I use 
naturally when I think she is asking me to sit there again. 

That sudden, tremendous, precipitous fall she has had from 
the steeps of anonymousness, from being almost anybody in 
general into being somebody in particular — the fall w^e both 
have had out of being everybody into being ourselves — makes 
us seem like two entirely different beings in a second. We have 
recovered our habit of being somebody in particular, and in- 
stead of acting as if we didn't know what we were about we take 
the liberty suddenly of behaving as though we were two quite 
intelligent human beings. 

This pleasant feeling of sudden intelligence that is always 
coming to people over the telephone when they find each other 



MUST GOVERNMENTS BE BIPERSONAL? 529 

out and proceed with a violent jerk of friendliness and of ef- 
ficiency to treat each other as if they knew something, and as 
if they were really somebody in particular, has seemed to me 
not without its bearing to-day on the relations of nations. It 
has seemed to me to light up the practical relations, too, between 
different classes of people in society and between employers and 
employees. 

The principle is seen working most plainly between employers 
and employees. 

What is really the matter with employers and employees, 
with Labour and Capital, to-day, can be traced back almost 
always to the cold gray tone. Several thousand invisible stock- 
holders through a few hundred invisible officers try to talk by 
long distance telephone, as it were, with a few thousand invisible 
operatives. Nobody feels he is dealing with anybody in par- 
ticular. So he holds back and does not show what is in him. 
He is on his guard or ugly. The very men in business who, if 
they came in direct contact with particular men, would be 
fellow human beings and simple and reasonable, are colourless. 
Everybody is mad because nobody feels he can make an impres- 
sion. It is as hard to make a nice human dent in a big going-by, 
conventional manufacturing business to-day as it is in a porce- 
lain lined bathtub. All the things and all the people in it and 
all the people's minds in it seem porcelain-lined throughout. 

And so at last everybody is overwhelmingly coming to see 
that no matter who he is, if one is to get things out of a man in 
business, one must treat him as if he were somebody in par- 
ticular. 

A man is much harder to deal with if he is not somebodj^ in 
particular. One never really gets down to business with any- 
body, never commits one's self in details, until one knows an 
important detail like who the man is and what he is like. It 
would not be hard to prove that nine out of ten labour troubles 
and class and national troubles to-day are based on our trying 
to deal with people by machinery, on our trying to do people 



530 WE 

off alike in huge thoughtless swoops. It is largely because 
nations try to get things done with one another in inhuman, 
impersonal and machine ways that we are always becoming 
unreasonable and having all these huge personal misunder- 
standings with each other, and it is because nations try to do 
things with lies, reservations, chilled-through diplomats, and 
cold gray tones, that they have been so inefficient in doing them. 

Ninety million people in a nation speaking to ninetj^ million 
people in another nation and narrowing themselves down 
through a diplomat as a kind of funnel naturally cannot hope 
to make an idea carry in a cold gray tone. 

The more people there are using a cold gray tone, the colder 
and grayer it is. 

A nation cannot make any other nation afraid of it or make 
any other nation honour, respect or trust it with a cold gray 
tone any more than a man can. 

The general realization of this principle among all classes of 
people in all countries except professional fighting men or pro- 
fessional national dickerers or diplomats — men who think they 
have a peculiar, inhuman, national, especially sterilized tone 
for expressing a nation — puts an entirely new and revolutionary 
face on the question of the most shrewd and practical program 
a nation can have of self-defense. 



We have all come to believe that every man has a right to be 
treated as if he were somebody in particular. 

So has every nation. 

If the attempt to get what one wants out of a man by not 
considering his personal feelings is regarded as unpractical, the 
attempt to get what one wants out of a nation by overriding 
the personal feeling of a nation is still more unpractical. It may 
have been the custom for hundreds of years not to consider 
nations as having personal feelings at all. And it may have 
been true that men who have a genius for being personal and 



MUST GOVERNMENTS BE IMPERSONAL? 531 

for expressing personality have not been the kind of men nations 
have chosen to express their personal feehngs. It is because 
the extreme personalness of the feehngs of nations has been 
overlooked that we see all the nations to-day at last — their 
feelings about each other all cooped up for fifty years — now 
fighting to express them. 

The practical way for one nation to deal with another and to 
come to terms with it is to deal with the nation not as if it were 
a big, abstract, vague hunk of statistics of people, but as if the 
nation, to put it roughly, were somebody in particular. 

Only men who are somebody in particular themselves and 
who have a delicate and masterful human sense of other people 
as being invariably somebody in particular, too, are going to be 
given the chance to act as diplomatists between nations. We 
are through with negative men and dickerers. The noble, 
human, astounding feats in getting the attention of nations, in 
engineering the fate of empires and in expressing to one another 
the souls of great peoples are sure to be beyond them. 

America as yet, in spite of her brilliant beginning by sending 
over to France a nation-revealing, masterfully naive specimen 
American human being like Benjamin Franklin, has not suc- 
ceeded in giving to other nations a supreme and compelling ex- 
pression of her national personality through her foreign min- 
isters and consuls. We have relied on the cold gray tone as 
other nations do. And the cold gray tone is no better than a 
penny whistle, and not so good, to express America through. 

The whole secret of having other nations get on with us and 
of defending ourselves from other nations turns on the power 
America must have as any gentleman has of expressing warmly 
and conveying in words and actions the American national per- 
sonality. 

America does not share at heart the cold gray tone idea of 
international diplomacy which has been thrust over America 
like an ether cone for a hundred years by the conventions of 
European courts. 



532 WE 

And we propose to throw the cold gray tone one side as a 
nation at last and to spend millions of dollars when we speak to 
other nations in being as much like ourselves as we like. 

The world of diplomacy for hundreds of years has been a 
world in which it has been proper to keep thinking and to keep 
talking in the third person. It is the Land of They and It. 

In business and in affairs men who deal with a man face to 
face as if he were in the third person neuter, as if he were an 
It, are being crowded out of their positions. One can see 
them on every hand — the men who do not have a vivid sense of 
human qualities — being crowded out of office by men who do. 
The governments of the world are almost the only places left 
now where people who are not vividly human and personal 
can keep their jobs. Even in governments they can only keep 
their jobs by having armies to help them. And even with all 
their armies, even with all the dear people joining in desperately 
on every field in Europe to eke out their governments* wits 
with their blood, they are merely managing to make their last 
desperate rally, these men who do not believe in human nature, 
before they forever lose their jobs. They must all go. 

Experts in human nature, who believe in it enough to make it 
work, will be in all the big places in governments, very soon, as 
they are now in business, in journalism, engineering and science. 

This is a revolutionary fact and makes possible a program of 
revolutionary and original national defense. 



II 

THE IDEA THAT A GOVERNMENT CANNOT MAKE 

A MISTAKE 

One fine sunny morning some years ago, at a time when I was 
just rounding up the ends and finishing off a new book, I sat 
down and deUberately took a little piece of yellow paper lying on 
my desk and proceeded to make fun of myself on it. The book 
I was finishing seemed to me so true, so just, so beautifully ex- 
pressed, so altogether lovely that I knew there must be some- 
thing very ridiculous about it or about me and I could not bear 
(to cut a long story short) to let another day go by without see- 
ing what it was. I felt that if I could see what it was before 
anybody else did, see it first and keep seeing it harder than any 
reader could, so that he could never really quite catch up to 
me in seeing how ridiculous I was, I would stand some chance of 
being believed in the things I saw about other people. 

This was the gist of the situation. I wanted to be believed, 
and knew that at bottom and in the long run I could not hope 
to get people to believe me about anything or about anybody 
as long as I got myself wrong. 

So I sat down deliberately with that poor, bleeding, raw 
three hundred pages of unpublished book and proceeded to be, 
that eventful morning, in a rough clumsy way, a whole row of 
people to it. 

Every time I fixed up something nice and comfy to believe 
about some place m it, I stripped it off. The husks of sweet 
illusions as I worked away, page after page, lay all about me 
on the floor. I did this all day, and all the next day. I am 
ashamed to say how long it took me to strip away one after 

533 



534 



WE 



another all the happy things I had managed to believe about 
that book. Finally I saw through to at least a kind of glimmer 
of what was the matter with it, and I sat down and wrote grimly 
■ — almost with tears of joy rolling down my cheeks — the follow- 
ing title page for it, the one that belonged with it, the one that 
anybody could see, from me up, it deserved : 






The 
Lost Art of Reading 



Gerald Stanley l.i 



G P Putnam's Sons 

New York and lordon 
Cb< knichctbockcT ptttm 



The publishers, to be sure, would not let me be straight-out 
and friendly in this way right in the front door so — of my book. 
They thought I ought to be more subtle as it were about it and 
go around to the side door with my humility, and it was shoved 
around a good deal and finally put in over on the three hun- 
dredth page or so — but at least I had faced the thing, I had 
keeled myself over at least a few minutes, and it did me good, 
and of course if anybody got as far as the three hundredth page, 
it did them, in a small way, good, too. 

What was more — at least as I looked at it, it gave me one 
more last chance with my reader. He and I were sure to have to 
get over (before that three hundredth page came) a good many 
tight places together in which I either saw more than he did or he 
saw more than I did, and in which we never really had it out, 
and possibly after I had been really friendly with him and stern 
against myself in this way he would go back to one of these places 
and do unto himself as I had done unto me. 



CAN GOVERNMENTS MAKE MISTAKES 535 

At all events, in any long book a reader and I may have to go 
through together, there are enough places where if the reader and 
I both would go outside around the house as it were, and peek in 
through a window at ourselves, it would help, and give the truth 
a good running chance between us. 

Anybody can guess what is coming next. Having given in, 
like this, I am going to take advantage of it. 

It seems to me that what I have been saying has a grim 
bearing on the way the nations just now are acting in Europe. 
The reader can say what he likes but I am going to say it — why 
shouldn't a nation now and then act like me.^ Why shouldn't a 
nation, just because there are, say a hundred million people in it 
instead of one, have nice, humble, lucid intervals.^ 

I think it is because the men who represent nations and who 
speak for nations think they ought always to speak in special, 
unnatural, big bowwow tones for a nation. They think a 
nation ought to have what might be called possibly a kind of 
national holy tone in speaking about itself. 

If they were more human, they would not do it. 

And this brings me to my contention. The men who repre- 
sent nations, the great totals of human beings, instead of being 
more human than we are, so that they can express us better than 
we can express ourselves, are less human than we are. Taken as 
a class, the world around, the men who act for the human beings, 
for the great groups of men w^e call nations, are below the aver- 
age of efficiency in seeing what human nature is really like, and 
acting for people and speaking for people as they are. I would 
not join the jeerers and say or seem to say that all officials are 
alike, that these men, prime ministers and others, are mere 
red tape monsters, huge leviathans and hippopotamuses of 
officiality, that they are all built with small lowered heads, with 
big stupid horns, with huge thick armoured skins lying in folds 
about them, or that nobody can ever get at a human feeling in 
them anywhere. But I am saying that whatever deep visions, 
ideas, or theories these men may have about human nature in 



536 WE 

their off moments or for their own daily use in their own Hves, 
they do not dare to let nations let themselves go, to let nations be 
natural, and they do not believe a nation should be allowed to 
take the liberty of being human in the plain homely way real 
people are, or that they are themselves. They do not see human 
nature underneath. They do not see that with the right men to 
handle it, being direct or human, dealing like one man with an- 
other, is the only thing in the long run a nation can make work. 

They tell us that two or three-hundred-year-old devices or ar- 
rangements would have to be fixed up for nations in this present 
world, before any nation could hope to make being human work. 
As a matter of fact, it is very simple. A nation can be human 
without any practice, without any thought, without any re- 
hearsals, all in a minute, the way the United States was the other 
day in Belgium. 

Why did the United States become human all in a minute the 
other day in Belgium? 

Because Brand Whitlock was there. He had the name United 
States on his door-plate, and assumed that the United States was 
just as human as he was, and acted accordingly. 

The representative of Germany in Brussels called on the 
American Minister and said he had come to enter an official pro- 
test for his government. He said that there was a wireless out- 
fit concealed in the top of the front chimney in the American 
Embassy building. He demanded of Mr. Whitlock that a com- 
mission from each government be appointed to investigate that 
chimney and hand in a report to their respective governments. 

"Is that so.'^" said Mr. Whitlock. "Germany thinks there is 
a wireless in that front chimney upstairs? Let's you and I just 
take a run upstairs to the roof and look down it together for a 
minute and see about it right off for ourselves." So Brand Whit- 
lock — or rather the United States — went up the stairs two steps 
at a time, Germany joyfully and cheerfully jumping along up 
behind him. And it was all over in three minutes. 

This is a very simple episode. It does not look like a very 



CAN GOVERNMENTS MAKE MISTAKES 537 

large affair at first sight. But as a good international working 
model of the way for two governments to act, of the spirit and 
the method that governments want and must have if they ever 
hope to get things done, it is a big and significant event and 
points out clearly how the war began and how it can be stopped, 
and how the kind of men the people are going to have to repre- 
sent them in their governments after this are going to get things 
done by allowing people to be as natural and as sensible, as 
free and strong, ninety millions at a time, as they are one at a 
time. 

It looks complicated and it certainly is complicated to take the 
kind of men we quite largely have in office now, especially in the 
old world, and have them all act like Brand Whitlocks. It 
takes Brand Whitlocks to do it, men who have a natural super- 
abundance of juice in them, who have such a gift of being human 
that they keep on being human and cannot help being human 
anywhere. 

The time is at hand when we are going to put in office men 
who are efficient as human beings and who are like folks and 
who represent folks. 



When people who have read Billy Sunday say he is irreverent, 
or frivolous, or that he is a poseur, or that (as some people seem 
to think) he is a mere financial adventurer or speculator in ser- 
mons, the most common reply one hears from people who have 
heard him is, *' I thought so, too, until I went and listened to him 
and watched him." Then for a few minutes one hears the more 
or less helpless apologist for Billy floundering about faithfully 
and trying to explain (like explaining the flavour of a raspberry 
to one who won't taste one), and saying how strangely and un- 
accountably different he feels about Billy now that he has seen 
him in person. After an hour and a half of giving Billy Sunday a 
chance to show what he can do in the way of saying " You and I " 
with people who feel like different orders of beings from him, al- 



538 WE 

most any man is apt to take an attitude he would not have 
thought he would at first. 

The same thing is always happening between nations. The 
Englishman is always saying he likes individual Americans he 
actually meets but that he hates Americans as a whole. Ger- 
mans feel much the same about individual Americans and iVmeri- 
cans about individual Germans. And Russians, Frenchmen, and 
Italians are like this, too. Nearly every nation in the abstract 
has a semi-hateful feeling toward other nations in the abstract. 
It is not the people in the nations that cannot get on. It is the 
abstracts of the people. 

Abstracts of nations are ugly because they are vague, in- 
accurate, unverified half-ghost and half -bone affairs, not looked 
up and not filled in enough to be lovable. The anatomy or skele- 
ton, the bare outline of a man is never beautiful, and the anatomy 
or skeleton, the spiritual skeleton of a nation, is never lovable. 
It is not even unlovable. It merely makes people suspicious. 
Live flesh-and-blood people always are and always will be shy 
and non-committal with angels, and the spiritual skeleton of a 
nation is too unbecoming to it to be practical, to make a practi- 
cal working basis for internationally noble and internationally 
human relations. 

The American National Personality, like any other person- 
ality, is a secret. 

It is only personality that accomplishes the great results 
among men, and it is only National Personality that can ac- 
complish results among nations. 

And personality only accomplishes these results by being ex- 
pressed. It takes an artist or a man with a special new tech- 
nique, and a very different technique from a diplomat's or a 
soldier's, to express a new National Personality among the 
nations. Various public men — Mr. Bryan, Mr. Roosevelt and 
Mr. Taft — have all hacked away happily on expressing us, but 
they have only expressed phases and moods of America. The 
only man we have produced as an artist who has been colossal 



CAN GOVERNMENTS MAKE MISTAKES 539 

enough and at once strange and familiar enough to express 
among the nations what the new national personality like Amer- 
ica is like in literature is Walt Whitman. The only one who has 
expressed it in statesmanship has been Lincoln, and he ex- 
pressed America to America rather than to other nations. 

No statesman has ever tried or had to try to express this 
strange, mighty, half -hewn personality that has silently grown 
up in the West, to other nations — until Woodrow Wilson now 
suddenly appears, fronts it up against a world, tells forty na- 
tions in a few simple words and a few plain actions what America 
is like. 

Mr. Wilson's first Lusitania note to Germany, while it looked 
at first to soldiers and many other people ineffectual, was a 
great achievement of statesmanship because it was conceived in 
the spirit of a great human document as an expression of the 
prayer, anger and hope of a people. The plain humanness in it, 
its simple, still, self -revelation of the controlled and truly great 
spirit of a great nation toward an irreparable injury, its success 
in at once expressing blame and high expectation, its sincere, 
cool, masterful sense of identity with the real or eventual soul 
of Germany — all these point the way to a new original and 
effective method of national defense. With a few We-person- 
alities put forward in America, put in places where they can ex- 
press simply and naturally the we-spirit and the we-religion of 
the American people to all other peoples, we are going to make a 
colossal program of Shooting Preparedness unnecessary. 



Ill 

THE IDEA THAT THE WAY FOR A GOVERNMENT 
TO CORRECT ONE MISTAKE IS TO MAKE ANOTHER 

"The gravestone over one German grenadier is more impor- 
tant than all the cathedrals of Europe," says General , a 

retired officer of the German army. 

1. This is logical. Be a barbarian and get through is the 
idea. 

2. The fate of Germany is the fate of the world. " Me and 
the World " is the idea back of the idea. 

But this is what England says: "Me and the World," and 
Russia says it, too. Anybody can say it. Somebody must be 
wrong. The fundamental illusion is that expressing this idea 
by killing people does not make any provision for corrections 
and emendations. We cannot tell a dead man we were mis- 
taken. 

This particular idea: "Me and the World," "Me and God," 
can only be completely and conclusively and well expressed by 
trying over and over again and by crossing out. 

The artist crosses out and modifies and lets in what the rest of 
the world thinks. The scientist uses the laboratory or let-us-try 
method. 

The trouble with war is that it proposes to stop trying, to 
throw over all experimenting for the truth and kill off the experi- 
menters. 

In war a nation says, on a subject on which the whole world 
disagrees: "We only are right." 

The only bright thing nations can do is to see that of course 
this cannot be so and accept it as one of the international axioms 

HO 



TO CORRECT ONE MISTAKE MAKE ANOTHER 541 

that it cannot be so. We will have every nation that belongs to 
the community of nations agree to use a method of expression 
which allows, as a war does not, for some doubts, and for cor- 
rections and emendations. 

War is an agreement between two nations that they cannot 
and will not have a new idea or learn anything in a war until 
they are whipped. Why should each nation be so hard on itself 
as to tie itself up in this way and agree not to know more or act 
as if it knew more, until it is whipped? Of course, besides, when 
a nation is whipped it is too tired and helpless to use a new idea. 
And if it whips, it is too proud to. 

The best issue of the war for all of us will be the victory of the 
nation that believes this first. The next best will be a draw or 
the exhaustion of every nation that fights, and an agreement on 
the part of each nation to take fifty years off to think, and fifty 
years more to put into power a government that can say what it 
thinks, in something better than dull, rudimentary exclamations 
and explosives, like guns. 



IV 

THE IDEA THAT A GOVERNMENT MUST 
NOT THINK 

They say, "The Kaiser says: *Me and God.' " They say the 
Kaiser a while ago was awarded by some society the prize, and 
"God got honourable mention." 

This is what passes as war talk. 

But I know an Englishman who is like this. And there is an 
American precisely like it just around the corner — just around 
anybody's corner. And there are days or moments in my life 
when I do not even have to go around the corner to find an 
American like this. For a few swift seconds at a time I have 
had a sharp twinge myself of this Me and God feeling. I 
merely did not dare to say it out loud. And if I had there 
would not have been anybody to encourage me. And this has 
saved me. If I was as exposed as a Kaiser is to people who were 
encouraging me, what would I come to.^ The Allies this minute 
in millions of times and places a day are all out in the fields all 
over Europe, saying, "Us and God!" They are all rushing in 
man after man and trying to drown Wilhelm out! They 
say he has driven them to it. It is true perhaps that "Us and 
God!" is a shade more humble, but nothing really to speak of. 
It is the same root idea. 

The fact is we are all human. And why not get together and 
confess to each other how human we are? And instead of mak- 
ing arrangements for expressing ourselves in rigid, unyielding, 
permanent and indelible art-forms, like murder, and then trying 
to apologize or correct ourselves to people in their graves, why 
not make international arrangements for expressing ourselves, 

542 



"A GOVERNMENT MUST NOT THINK" 543 

and our especially stupid moments in less indelible ways? Why 
not arrange to have our enemies, instead of wiping our grand- 
children's tears away, wipe ours? It is all a matter of choosing 
a less sudden and less finished way of uttering our unfinished 
ideas. Human nature is alike in all countries. Countries are 
mixed. It is hard for a single man to express himself the first 
time. Countries have to try harder. Countries are as human 
as we are. We all know that this is true about human nature. 
We all see it about ourselves and about each other. Our gover- 
nors and our diplomats and our soldiers are not the kind of 
men that do. So we have war. They say suddenly in a week 
or so that we must be like them and express ourselves like them ! 
And then we all rush in in a week and do it! We ask ourselves 
while we hack away on each other, Why do we do it? 

Because suddenly the world has been handed over under the 
supposed exigency of a supposed war — supposed by certain 
supposed people — to the third class minds of the world. In the 
ordinary course of business and affairs the third class minds of 
the world — the soldiers or gun thinkers and the politicians or 
law-and-police thinkers — are kept in the background where they 
belong, by men who do things. 

The people in Germany who run the ocean steamship lines 
and make the aniline dyes for nations, the men in Paris who 
choose the clothes of the world, and the men who run the mills 
in Manchester and the banks in London, all these men see daily 
and use daily the fallibility and flexibility of human nature and 
the governments do not. Governments have the Me and God 
habit. They cannot think. And of course no government — 
neither the American government nor any — can think, as long 
as it keeps saying Me and God. 

Our American feeling about the "Me and God" habit in 
nations is not addressed to any one nation. We are all human 
beings. We do not propose to be cooped up or shut in in our 
love and criticism to mere geographical streaks or spots of 
people on this planet. This planet is small enough as it is when 



544 WE 

we consider the height and depth, the starry height and depth 
of the human spirit that wavers and glows through us all — ^Wag- 
ner and Shakespeare, Tolstoi, and Moliere! Though the 
cathedrals quarrel together and sing praises with siege-guns to 
their own little foolish national souls, and rain bombs on each 
other's naves, we take our stand in America by the great bells 
ringing in their towers, by the souls of their poets overriding the 
years, by the prayers and songs of their heroes, artists, inven- 
tors, by the mothers and the little children. 

We are all in the same world. We are all alike. We will not 
say of any one nation what we will not say of the others. And 
we will not say of any man what we will not say of ourselves. 

We may occasionally do ourselves injustice in this way for the 
moment. But what is true of any of us is latently true of all 
of us, and the only practical thorough way to correct other 
people is to set one's self right. 

The only nations that can hope to learn how to correct other 
people are those who have learned how by practising very hard 
and very long on themselves. 

By the time nations get through practising on themselves, 
other nations want to be like them usually — whole races will 
want to be like them. They will not have to say much. 

We all know this as plain folks. Why do not the govern- 
ments of plain folks act in a quarrel more like plain folks.'^ 
Plain folks almost never use physical force now, and plain folks 
always keep aware of a margin in a quarrel in which they know, 
privately, or know they are going to know, they are wrong. 
They provide for this and quarrel in ways that can be taken 
back. If a single man stands up and acts like a small boy in a 
fit of anger and throws his fists about he will be shamed out of 
it on almost any street of the world. But if a government rep- 
resenting ninety million people acts in the same way everybody 
seems to think it cannot be helped. People seem to expect 
governments not to know any better. People are only allowed 
to be childish now millions at a time. Small boys and bullies 



"A GOVERNMENT MUST NOT THINK" 545 

are almost the only ones left in modern life who act the way 
governments do. The reason for this seems to be that the com- 
mon people in our modern world have been growing faster than 
their governments. While people in doing all the wide work of 
the modern world have been limbering up into all kinds of men, 
for hundreds of years a special kind of official person— official, 
smoothminded as a rifle, impenetrable, inhuman — has very 
largely been picked out in countries to represent the interests 
of the people. 

Red tape and gunpowder instead of blood and brains have 
been depended upon by these people. They naturally live in a 
routine of thinking they know more than other people do. 
They have come to be a special left-over ordering kind of per- 
son, the person who gets things done by bullying rather than by 
thinking. This is why governments to-day are doing such strange 
left-over things perhaps. A government that is engaged at 
home every day, bullying and not thinking with its own people, 
naturally cannot stop. Getting things by not thinking and 
bullying at home, it tries to get things by not thinking and bully- 
ing away from home. It is clumsy in using other ways. 

It is a mere humdrum or convention that this has been allowed 
by the different peoples. Because their governments were full 
of uninteresting men and did not interest them, busy and happy 
nations have allowed their governments to edge and riggle its 
way on year after year. 

Each nation has been just privately ashamed of its own govern- 
ment at home but it did not think what would be almost sure to 
happen the moment the government instead of merely being 
stupid with its own people in a nice, safe, private way at home 
tried being stupid with all the other nations. 

But governments do not change in a crisis. It is easy to judge 
the diplomats too harshly. Men who conduct governments 
could not really be expected not to have their intellectual tone 
pulled down, year after year, being so mixed up as they are all the 
time with armies and with fighters. It makes them naturally 



546 WE 

see things with a twist, in a moony romantic and unpractical 
way, and with only the most rudimentary knowledge of human 
nature. They get stronger on gold lace and brass bands and ex- 
plosives in most armies than they are on human nature or on 
what really works with human nature. 

It is only fair to admit that we cannot say much in America. 
Our Government would not be any better really, if it had to 
associate every day, as most European governments do, with 
soldiers. It is because our army and our Government in Amer- 
ica never pay very much attention to each other that the coun- 
try is so safe. Our Government does not feel obliged to make 
our army's mistakes as well as its own, and our army every 
time our Government makes a mistake does not have to put 
the mistake into guns and proceed to blow up the world with 
it. What is the matter with them in Europe just now seems to 
be the terrible intimacy of their mistakes with their guns. 

It is a curious idea — having an army and a government right 
alongside in this way. One might know, one would think, that 
almost any day they would be short-circuited. 



THE IDEA THAT A NATION MUST NOT BE ALLOWED 

TO BE HUMAN 

The governments of the world have all been telling the anti- 
militarists and other modern-minded men that the ideas they 
have of substitutes for armies and navies in the defense of 
nations are not practical and that the governments cannot make 
them work. 

If the peace-people instead of banging away and bearing on 
and saying how practical their ideas are would come to a short 
clean stop, would admit to the governments that of course the 
governments cannot make them work and would then proceed 
to put in governments that can, we would soon have an inter- 
national self-revelation, and find ourselves plunged into a mutual 
demonstration of peace that would turn the world right side up. 

Peace is not merely a row of propositions to be believed. 

It is an array of men who believe them. 

For peace-people to get up all around the world, and make 
dabs at governments, and for peace-people to ask a crowd of 
war-people clanking about with swords and guns to carry their 
peace ideas out, is visionary. 

The governments of the world are nearly all of them quite 
right about themselves. They are nearly all doing the best they 
can. They never have done better than during the last eight 
months. They are acting at last precisely the way they feel 
and showing everybody what they are. The last eight months 
of Europe is the best that this kind of men can do. 

If people like this last eight months of Europe as samples of 
history, if this last eight months of Europe represents the peo- 

547 



548 WE 

pie, all the people have to do when the war is over is to ask these 
same men to take hold of the governments. These same men 
will then proceed to get ready (as fast as everybody can pay 
the bills and as fast as everybody can get born to be shot) to 
appear at their best again. We will soon have arranged for us 
another sample of their kind of history. Then we will see these 
same men out in front of us (for fifty million dollars a day) 
appearing at their best again. 

I believe that peace-people are about to stop scolding and 
expecting with the governments of the world. We do not pro- 
pose the moment we see that these men are through and are all 
'out of breath expressing their ideas to try to get them to turn 
straight around and express ours. 

They have had their turn in expressing theirs. Everybody 
will know when this war is over what their ideas are. We will 
turn them out and express ours. 

The peace issue in the world at large is the home issue in 
every nation, the issue of turning out scared men in all the 
governments of the world and putting in men who are not 
afraid. 

The wrong kind of men are running the governments of 
the world. 

This is the fundamental news the war is trying to tell us about 
history and about ourselves. 

The wrong kind of men make the wrong kind of things happen. 

Men are the roots of events. 

At bottom all that is the matter with Europe is that in each 
nation the wrong temperament, by preoccupation of the people 
in business and in the creative arts of life, has been allowed to 
get on top in the government and that each nation is busy mis- 
representing itself. This is why probably each nation began 
this war by being so childish, by trying to look worse — that is, 
more terrible than it was. This is supposed to be the regular 
thing for a military or scared government to do. It's a kind of 
convention or humdrum of the governmental mind. It is 



"A NATION MUST NOT BE HUMAN" 549 

like two and two are four to the governmental mind, that, of 
course, if you are scared, you must look terrific, talk in a full- 
toned, pipe-organ tone, swell around and make the world won- 
der what it can possibly do if you do not get what you want. 
If you are scared, scare somebody else more is the principle — 
the government humdrums. 

And of course as everybody knows this principle and as every- 
body understands it and as every nation knows it about every 
other nation and allows for it, it does not work. 

I do not believe what a single nation in Europe to-day is say- 
ing about itself, except Belgium. Each nation I know of has at 
least got itself wrong, to say nothing of the mistakes it has made 
on the other nations. 

Each nation has got itself wrong because the governing classes 
in each nation under the present red-tape, out-of-date regime 
not yet stretched to the real life of our time, have been men of the 
wrong temperament — men who can only work either a fighting 
machine or a hemming and hawing machine. They are the kind 
of men who notoriously the world over cannot express themselves 
or anyone else. So they hem and haw forty years. Then they 
fight. We will put in their places men with some grit of faith — 
faith in themselves and other peoples, transparent men, clear, 
vivid, resonant human men, whose faces light up and whose 
voices ring. 



VI 

THE IDEA THAT A NATION CANNOT LAUGH 

Everybody is familiar with how a sense of humour in a man 
gets things done, surrounds, penetrates and overcomes obstacles 
in people and makes impossibilities come to pass. Most of the 
practical and powerful men who achieve results in business and 
affairs have a game or sporting instinct about themselves, a 
genius of give and take, a kind of insinuating, irrepressible, un- 
conquerable and persistent limberness. They bend into their 
own way. They turn on themselves and laugh. Then they 
pray. The great protection of a nation in a time of war is its 
sense of humour. A kind of loyal plucky gay self-criticism is 
the very stuff that peace is made of. It was because Lincoln 
could laugh at himself, could laugh at his own side, could keep 
from taking himself seriously at the fatal moment, because he 
was big enough not even to take a nation seriously all the time, 
because he insisted on letting the nation be as human as he was 
and made the nation look as human as he was, that he became 
the most expressive, powerful and practical government oflBcial 
of modern times. Any man who can represent or has the nerve 
to represent his nation as human, as being capable of making a 
mistake and of trying again, will be in a position soon to make a 
nation trusted and loved. Then it will not need to fight. 

One is constantly seeing what a sense of humour is able to 
accomplish when men get together. Why should it not work 
when nations get together? Why should not nations have it? 

I believe they have. The moment we give up picking out 
military-minded men to represent us — men who depend upon 
commanding instead of thinking to get things, and upon their 

550 



A NATION CANNOT LAUGH 551 

power of position rather than their power of self-expression, 
self-insight and self-revelation — nations will have too much 
sense of humour to fight. With human beings in office nations 
will laugh at themselves, criticise themselves, and see through 
themselves until they see clear through to peace. 



VII 

THE IDEA THAT A NATION AS A MATTER OF 

PRINCIPLE MUST EXPECT TO BE MORALLY 

SECOND-RATE 

** A nation cannot be as noble as a single man in it can," said 
Lord Rosebery. 

I would say a single man cannot hope to be as noble as a na- 
tion can. 

A nation is capable of an acceleration, a momentum of moral 
action. The nobility that is in a single man a nation can raise 
to an n^^ power. One man who pulls himself together and loves, 
or one man who pulls himself together and hates, is impressive. 
A nation that pulls itself together and loves is sublime. 

Even a nation that pulls itself together and hates all over with 
one mighty heat of hate is sublime. Every man in Germany 
who is singing Lissauer's chant of hate and fighting England with 
that chant of hate has ten times as much hate in his one single 
heart as he would have if he were hating as a single man. He 
hates everybody else's hate on top of his own hate. One stick 
of wood in a fire may be hot, but it is hotter with three more, and 
still hotter — that one stick — with three million more. 

It is absurd to say a nation cannot be as noble as a single man 
can. It is a defiance of psychology and of the laws of dynamics 
in the human heart. 

The people who try to draw one off from a kind of general 
nice outdoors of conversation at a dinner in which everybody by 
turns takes part, into a kind of lonely corner or back hall of just 
talking with them — the people who think things and see things 
in twos, and who keep on pegging away on a two horsepower idea 

552 



NATIONS MUST BE MORALLY SECOND-RATE 553 

with the twelve horses right on the spot all around them, all 
prancing and waiting for a good tally-ho run right beside them— 
are very suggestive of how a government should not be run. 

A dinner is a fine symbol of society. All the best thinking 
and talking at dinners, the fine moments, the ones everybody 
remembers, are the general engagements. One subject and 
everybody taking a turn at it is Democracy. 

The attempt to cut up a dinner of twelve people into six small 
tables which Europe has been trying to make the last fifty 
years cannot but be a failure. 

Twelve men all on one subject are more than twelve times 
one man. Put twelve men together and let them think freely 
in turn and they immediately proceed to producing between 
them one great man. Twelve nations would produce one great 
world. 

A great man may be defined as a man who has listened to a 
crowd talking, who catches up in spirit each ordinary little con- 
tributory man and composes him, what is wanted of him, into a 
whole. Thus he expresses the whole of the truth. 

A great nation may be defined as a nation which has listened 
to a crowd talking, has listened to its own people. 

Then it listens to the other nations. 



VIII 
CHIPS 

It is a humdrum idea that courage can be associated in 1916 
with the sword. The courage to stand by one's common sense 
when everybody else is pawing the air with wrath, or standing 
around looking brave with epaulets and swords and drums and 
fine language and big-sounding, hollow, provincially patriotic 
talk about God and country, is real courage. 

America is going to try to have it. 

To let the nations gather around us and call us cowards be- 
cause we will not fight their way will be courage. 

Duels used to be brave and sincere. Now they are cowardly. 
They had to be stopped by law because people individually were 
too scared not to slash one another. 

A chip on a shoulder, national or individual, says: *' You say I 
am afraid to fight you. I am so afraid I can't make- anybody 
believe I'm not afraid and so afraid I'll believe I'm afraid myself, 
that I am going to fight." 

But the scientific spirit has changed all this. The stern, 
homely, clear-headedness of our modern world rejects this super- 
ficial noisy and false idea of bravery. It no longer seems to us 
to be bravery. We are not impressed. All we see in it is sloppy 
and effeminate thinking. It has gone by for men. Now it is 
going by for nations. 



554 



LOOK ni 

THE WE COUNTRY 
I 
TAKING THE WAR TO OURSELVES 

THIS European war we are having, as it flings up its soul 
upon the sky of the world to-day, is a direct, personal, 
intimate, spiritual experience of every man of us. It 
would be a pity with fifty million dollars and twenty thousand 
lives a day being spent on us, spent on dramatizing for us and 
putting on the stage of a whole continent for us, where we can 
see it, the truth about our own hearts, and what the pride that 
is in them, the overriding that is in them is really like, how it 
really works, and what it leads to . . . here it all is! ... . 
would it not be a pity to have it all wasted, not to get all 
we can out of it, to have all its cries and tears sweep past us, 
leave us unhallowed, haughty, self-blinded, small, mean and 
sleek about ourselves? 

America in the European war stands solemnly, face to face 
with herself. Now is our time to search our hearts and to estab- 
lish our foundations, overhaul our religion, true our business, 
face our war with ourselves, our war with labour, with capital, 
not merely because it will be good for America, but because it 
is our only way to understand Europe or to know human nature 
enough to help Europe. 

Our shortest way in America to understand the fight in Europe 
as it goes on from day to day is to stop fighting at home. Every 
day after reading the war news in the paper we can go to the 

555 



556 WE 

office, to the factory, to the bank, to the bench, and move the 
news right over which has been cabled from Europe to our own 
lives. There is not an hour passes that a man in business to-day 
cannot get the good of the news from Europe that morning and 
put it into the way he does his work before noon. The European 
war has a bearing on the man at the next bench, and on every 
man's foreman, on his union, and on how he treats his employ- 
ers, and on how he responds to the way they treat him, on how 
he votes in his union and how he turns out his work. It is all 
personal news — the news from Europe is. It might as well 
come from those grim battlefields by private wire to each 
man's life. The newspapers are full to-day, every morning, 
of news to a man dated Berlin and London, Petrograd, Con- 
stantinople — news to him about how to get on with his own wife, 
scare-heads to him on how to keep from fighting with the people 
next door, and cablegrams to him on the importance of seeing 
through himself, of criticising himself and getting on with him- 
self. 

The American people are proposing to do in this war the 
thing we will have wished we had done in twenty years. Amer- 
ica wants to be thorough. She wants to be deep with the 
war. 

How can ninety million people be deep.'* Ninety million 
people can only be deep by being personal. 

Partly by watching the acts of others and partly by our own 
instinct we know that the only way that any man, even a gov- 
ernmental official, can hope to get and use the strength of a 
truth is to let the truth pass through his system and be assimi- 
lated and pass daily in and out of his own life. 

The hope of America and the hope of the rest of the world for 
America is that while all the other nations are busy doing other 
things with this war America is going to digest it. 

It is only by taking everything that happens in it personally 
and humanly and using it for ourselves, applying it harshly to 
our own hearts and lives, that we are going to be deep enough 



TAKING THE WAR TO OURSELVES 557 

and true to human nature enough, when the time of settHng 
comes, to be of use to other nations. 

The nations over in Europe, each shut grimly away in its own 
part of the war, must be able to feel that all of the war, at heart, 
at least, has happened to us. If we cannot so true and so deepen 
ourselves as to stand and be seen by all to stand on the main 
highway of the world, with our thoughts, our desires and our 
decisions moving along the great common trunk line of all peo- 
ples and of all history, the one single great nation that the war 
has left free to be human, that the war has left free to stand near 
the centre of the human heart and strike the balance of the 
world, will have fallen short of what a world has a right to ex- 
pect from it. 

All Europe has turned itself into a vast Sunday-school, a 
kind of movie-picture Sunday-school, for Americans, on how 
Americans, if they think of it in time, can avoid what happens 
to fighters. Europe has extemporized for every man's own use, 
and for every nation, a kind of vast contemporary hell we can 
all watch ourselves in, in advance, unless we take warning in 
time — employers and employees, husbands and wives, and boys 
playing in the streets — and unless we give up the idea once for 
all that fighting gets anything, and begin to bone down quickly 
to getting things with each other instead of getting things out of 
each other. 

We are living in an inventor's world — a great tissue of team- 
work between things and people. 

The whole thing has been tried out. Turnips corn and 
potatoes have all been cultivated. Everybody already believes 
that the more we work with turnips and the more we work with 
corn and the more we work with potatoes instead of against the 
turnips and against the corn and against the potatoes, the more 
turnips corn and potatoes we get. 

It is curious how slow we have been in getting around to seeing 
that it pays to cultivate people almost as well as turnips and 
corn. One would have thought we would have thought of it first. 



558 WE 

The main idea that Europe is spending fifty milUon dollars a 
day trying to express to us in America might all be boiled down 
into a telegram, into ten homely words : 

"Do team-work with people over there in America the way you do 
team-work with turnips and with corn." 

There are five remarks Europe keeps making to us every day 
which might be said to underlie this telegram : 

"As the Crown Prince of Germany puts it, 'This war is a 
stupid war.' 

"The idea that things in this world can only be had by taking 
them away from somebody else is a sick illusion. 

"What human nature wants just now is not a larger territory 
of people but intensive gardening of the people we have. 

"If you cultivate one another over there in America, you will 
all be rich. 

"If you cultivate one another over there in America while we 
are fighting one another everything we have will belong to you, 
everything we want we will have to borrow from you, and you 
will become, by the common consent of all of us, the leaders of 
the material and of the spiritual interests of the world." 

Europe says this last thing to us bitterly, and, if America does 
not take her power which she has had heaped up upon her in 
behalf of all the other nations and use it in team-work with all the 
world, America will proceed to be not only the most hated, but 
the most hateful, nation since the world began. 

As to how this is coming out, I can only leave it to the reader. 
My own idea would be that a nation which believes in team- 
work and which keeps on doing team-work when all other na- 
tions have stopped it and are fighting with one another — a 
nation which wins a temporary leadership over other nations by 
doing team-work with itself — will see that it can only keep its 
leadership by doing team-work with the nations it wants to 
lead. 



TAKING THE WAR TO OURSELVES 550 

Then the nations will want it to lead. If they find America 
can keep the balance and arrange team-work with them better 
than they can with one another, America may soon become the 
only nation upon whom they can all unite. 

I do not want to claim too much, but I believe America has 
a good running chance to be the nation to be asked to render 
the nations this service. Already we have practically broken 
in our American life the sinews of war between classes. The 
distinction between labourers and employers is breaking down all 
around us. We have seen that we are all labourers and that we 
are all employers. 

We have seen that every human being is a labourer, an 
employer and a small public or consumer, by turns. A la- 
bourer is his wife's employer. A mother is the employer of her 
children. A newsboy employs other newsboys, and a labour 
union man employs labour leaders to represent him. Every 
voter is an employer. 

We have seen that people cannot be divided off into employ- 
ing and working classes. We all belong to all classes. 

All classes are one class at heart. In proportion as a clan 
becomes powerful, it acts on this principle. 

All nations are one at heart. The nation that sees this idea 
first, believes it and expresses it, stands out for it and conducts 
its program of national defense so that it proves it believes it, 
will be believed in by other nations first, and will first be in a 
position to be asked to act if need be as referee for a world. 

The word "Empire" does not interest America so much as 
the word "Umpire." With a nation that can get itself ready 
to be wanted as Umpire, Empire is going to take care of itself. 



II 

WE WORKMEN AND NATIONAL DEFENSE 

There cannot be said to be anything very new so far in the 
way the American people express their feehng about peace. 

All of the peoples of all the nations have said beautiful things 
about how they believed in peace. When at any particular 
time the people in a nation all get up and say all these things 
about peace loudly and sweetly, the trouble comes in getting 
other nations to believe them. 

It was the way every nation kept talking about how beautiful 
peace was that started the war. The peace talk brought to a 
head each nation's conviction that it was the only nation that 
could be trusted. 

How can America be so literal in her belief in peace that when 
she talks peace every nation on earth will believe her? 

How can we prove in America to ourselves and to one another 
and to the world that we really depend on peace and that in a 
dangerous crisis between nations America will rush to peace as 
other nations rush to arms? How are we going to be made in 
America to take peace seriously the way we take salt, fire, water 
and air, eating, drinking and breathing? 

I imagine it is going to be very much in the same way we have 
come, most of us, to taking salt seriously, and fire, water and 
air, and eating, drinking and breathing. We have all tried not 
breathing enough to see what it is like and to make comparisons. 
The best program for getting Americans to believe in peace, 
especially to believe in it with the deep, terrific, still seriousness 
that will make people afraid of us, is to keep up our peace 
practice at home, to keep up a national and daily drill in America 

560 



WE WORKMEN AND NATIONAL DEFENSE 561 

in getting on with one another, a regimen of making peace work. 
We will initiate a peace drill for all Americans in their homes, in 
the shops, and in the fields, beside which the drill, the marching 
and countermarching of the German militia, for the last fift>- 
years, will look childish. America is going to appropriate and 
take over and use our whole nation as a peace laboratory in 
which every man, woman and child every day is trying peace 
out and seeing how it works. 

Every man living knows by his own private observations and 
personal experiments how Germany and England feel in fighting 
to get what they want. We have all tried getting things on this 
principle. 

Every man's life is an international experiment station in this 
principle. 

War between nations is a kind of momentum of the war they 
have at home. 

Peace is momentum, too. 

The men who refuse to fight, the men who cooperate with their 
small brothers when they play and who are at peace with one 
another when they work, and at peace with their wives when 
they go home from work, come naturally to have a kind of 
habitual taking-for-granted attitude toward peace as a means of 
getting things, and they cannot stop when they come to plan to 
deal with nations. 

When disarmament finally comes to people who have won 
their spurs by peace, who have got everything they have ever got 
by peace, it is going to come as a habit, a momentum. I have 
seen that when a great international crisis comes our people shall 
throw their arms furiously away. They shall have a kind of 
fierce peace. They shall rush to peace before it may be too 
late. The thing that they have tried out and made good on in 
their own private lives and business lives they will depend on 
still more desperately, still more swiftly and magnificently for 
the life of the nation. 

Any nation that wants to fight us we will assail with colossal 



5Q^ WE 

advertisements of team-work — advertisements of team-work 
they will want to do with us, of team-work we are doing with our- 
selves. With fear or with love we shall hold them at bay. 



A national daily drill in habits of team-work may not have 
quite the fine sound or the brave look of a brass band and gold 
lace and epaulets going through the streets, but it is plain Amer- 
ican common sense, is the only honest, deep, thorough and 
manly way for American men to propose to protect this nation 
from other nations, and there is not a man of us who does not 
know it. 

There are certain definite results that are bound to come 
perennially, to keep coming like spring and summer, to a nation 
that enters upon a huge, daily, unanimous national drill of readi- 
ness in understanding and in being understood. 

The American labourer who does his work feeling that he is a 
partner will do a third more work in a day than labourers will in 
other countries where the fight-psychology possesses the people 
and where employers and employees are all busy all day in fight- 
ing each other's interests in the shops, and going home at night 
to hold meetings to think how they can fight better in the 
morning. 

The American labourer being able to earn a third more money 
in a year for his employer will have an employer who will give 
and will be able to give him a third more money a year to spend. 
He will spend it creating a third bigger market. 

There will be (not counting Sundays) three hundred and fifteen 
days a year of creating wealth in other nations, and there will be 
practically four hundred and fifteen days in a year of creating 
and piling up wealth in America. 

America will produce a third cheaper than anybody else any- 
thing she wants, and will not need anything anybody has, or 
need to be afraid of anybody because she does. 

If worst comes to worst, and America after all has to indulge 



WE WORKMEN AND NATIONAL DEFENSE 563 

in a vulgar and rather discouraged thing hke merely defending 
itself, it will have rolled up an amount of peace and a habit of 
peace to defend itself with that no other nation could begin to 
touch. No nation in which all the people are trained to fight, in 
which the daily labourers, the rank and file of the people, are not 
only being trained to fight but are being infected and degraded 
by army habits of thought, by the constant psychology of assert- 
ing their interests against others instead of with others in its 
every-day work, can hope to keep from becoming more and more 
underwitted in the use of a powerful and modern weapon of self- 
defense like peace. Fighting nations will cut themselves oft* 
from all mutual-interest practice, all daily drill, all stern self- 
discipline in using and serving others. Fighters will necessarily 
become ugly, lonely, effeminate and soft toward themselves, and 
helplessly on their own side. The mutual interests with foreign 
nations, which modern nations defend themselves with, can only 
be discovered, cultivated maintained and by a nation full of 
men of all classes who have a daily habit and momentum, a 
headway of living and working on mutual interests at home. 

A nation that is not only getting a third more wealth a year 
out of being at peace with itself, but is getting a third more edu- 
cation and thinking skill a year, a third more understanding, and 
is piling up a third more brains for getting on with human na- 
ture, a nation in which all the people, a hundred million of them 
a year, are engaged in doing nothing else all day but studying 
how to understand other people, will be invincible. Every- 
thing that Americans do will educate them, ennoble them, and 
make people afraid to interrupt them. At last perhaps a great 
nation shall be dealt with the way people deal with a great man, 
with awe and love. We will front the world with unquenchable 

peace. 

A hundred miUion people who are doing their daily work by 
being shrewd and practical and peaceful, who are discovering, 
inventing and using peace as an energy and as a way of gettmg 
things, will soon, out of its daily habit, produce and place in the 



564 WE 

courts of the world an array of diplomatic geniuses, of master 
mind-readers of nations, of nation impresarios, of international 
orchestra conductors, that no crude lonely fighter-nation could 
hope to rival. 

Our peace proletariat out of a hundred million rehearsals and 
daily drills of peace will create, possess and elect peace geniuses 
to express us to other nations. The nation that can express it- 
self the best will win the other nations, will be asked to express 
the other nations to one another, will be asked to express a world. 
No one will be able to withstand the peace geniuses, the experts 
of mutual interests that such a nation by having so much to 
choose from could put forward. They will be diplomats that no 
one can circumvent into fighting and that no one can take away 
from us. We will always have them for ours because we can 
endlessly produce more of them. They will reach down into the 
roots of our national life. They will be the mere mountain-tops 
of the genius of our people. America's peace will overflow the 
world. We will not have to whine about peace, or to run to the 
same dear old Mr. Carnegie once more to help us whine louder. 
We will not even moralize about peace. We will possess peace. 
We will go about making our own daily business alive, terrible 
and beautiful with peace. People will see peace flowing out of 
our factories at night, pouring out of shops and stores, running 
up and down the streets, and they will be afraid. The world will 
be fitted up with one national working model of peace. Any 
half -noticing nation will be able to see, with a look, how peace 
works. We will not need to superimpose our peace on others. 
They will covet it, and covet sharing it, and covet the fruits 
of it. 

Then shall the earth be filled with the eagerness and the 
passion of peace. 

Then at last perhaps we will be able, some of us, to look back 
at the peace talk we have been having, with patience and hu- 
mour. We will remember faintly, forgivingly, all these gravely 
empty people we have watched for years in the Hague Palace, 



WE WORKMEN AND NATIONAL DEFENSE 565 

who instead of making the Peace Palace a huge Engineering 
Room for nations, a World Power-house, have made the Hague 
Palace come to look to us— to some of us— like a kind of Morality 
Museum, like some huge, beautiful, refined Mrs. Jarley*s Wax 
Works of Peace. 



Ill 

WE SALESMEN AND NATIONAL DEFENSE 

Even the most ordinary low-geared and i-sized business man 
who still goes about whining business-is-business, and who still 
humdrums along thinking he must be one kind of man toward 
people in a parlour and another kind of man — a kind of polite, 
polished-up beast of prey — in his office, on the street, or in a 
shop, admits that the one thing that business is made of and 
that makes business go is credit. 

By credit, he means a man's reputation of ability to pay. 

Credit or the reputation of the ability to pay is what ever;y 
business man works with and works for. Credit is the hum- 
drum business man's religion. 

All that an ordinary business man who believes in credit has 
to do to rise into the next class to-day is to move over from Me 
Alley and set up in business on The Avenue or You and I Street, 
the great shopping thoroughfare of the world. The moment the 
ordinary business man who believes in credit carries his belief in 
credit a little farther, slips it around the next corner and believes 
in credit more, he becomes a big business man and proceeds to 
act like a big business man the next morning. 

When the credit a man depends on to run his business is his 
reputation of his ability to pay, he is getting along with as little 
credit as he can. The least credit a man could get along with 
and do business at all, is a slow, stupid, logy reputation of ability 
to pay. A cash register with a click, a ticket and a bell could 
have a reputation of ability to pay. 

The reputation the big business man is trying to get is the 
reputation of ability to serve, and of a genius for being necessary. 

566 



WE SALESMEN AND NATIONAL DEFENSE .567 

Credit for paying one's bills, i. e., a solid, substantial reputation 
for the money one takes out of other people's pockets— is not 
half as good business as a reputation for the money one puts into 
them. One would think that anyone -would know that a repu- 
tation for making one's customers rich and making profits for 
one's customers would be a great deal more businesslike than a 
reputation for making profits one's self, and yet we have to face 
the fact that this negative, half -dead and half-alive idea of credit 
as a mere reputation for being able to pay one's own bills without 
a reputation for going around and helping everybody one does 
business with pay theirs, is what humdrum business has been 
practically run on for the last fifty years. 

I have a revolutionary faith in what American business men 
are going to do to defend the nation because I have seen or begun 
to see the sweeping victory of corporations that believe in this 
bigger, larger, more permanently profitable kind of credit. Cor- 
porations, in other words, that believe in the Sermon on the 
Mount as the only practical shrewd working basis for getting 
and holding business, are going to drive all other kinds of busi- 
ness men, all the other morally hand-to-mouth and feeble i-sized 
business men out of their way and out of the people's way and 
sweep the country. 

With the Sermon on the Mount in control and in known con- 
trol of American character and of the iVmerican ways of dealing 
with others and of the lives of American people, the need for 
having our business men in Boston and in New York all running 
scared out of the back doors of their oflaces and rushing wildly 
out to Plattsburgh, N. Y., and drilling night and day to defend 
America and American business and American ways of doing 
business, with guns, will have passed over. 

Business is in control of the world. 

Controlling business men are We Country men. 



IV 

NINETY MILLION FACES 

If America really is a We Country all it has to do is to adver- 
tise, let people look at it just as it is and it is defended. 

(1) America will employ a great General Staff of Artists — 
mind-readers of nations, who through the daily press and foreign 
magazines and books, shall touch the imagination of all nations. 
We will make this Press Bureau the countenance of this nation 
looking enemy-nations in the eyes. 

What they see in our eyes will defend us ; and what they see 
in our eyes will defend them. 

If people know who a man is, if he has already kept himself 
expressed to them, his look is all that is necessary. 

America needs but to be expressed and to spend enough time 
and money, freedom and genius, in being expressed and no one 
will want to fight us. We shall disarm the nations with a look, 
and wars shall be smiled away. 

(2) America will spend in self-defense a hundred millions of 
dollars a year on an army and navy of moving pictures, that 
shall cover the face of the earth. 

The American people will propose as a nation to begin fighting 
with pictures before we begin fighting with guns. It will be a 
great still peaceful war of seeing things. We will start a new 
fashion. We believe that nations after this, instead of fighting 
each other with guns, will have fights of photographs; they will 
fight their way into each other's hearts, into forgiveness and 
understanding; they will fight their way into each other's very 
presences, with vast flowing, ceaseless, resistless moving pictures 
of themselves, with mighty pictured catalogues of things to love, 
to covet, to exchange; of things to hope and to pray and things 

568 



NINETY MILLION FACES 5G9 

to strive for together. We shall be conquered with processions 
of faces, with each other's little children. We will come on each 
other saying our prayers, and we will overhear each other's cries 
to God. 

Mr. Edison with his films in Orange, New Jersey, with his 
mighty flocks and herds of pictures softly nightly flashing and 
clicking around the world, weaving the nations into the light in 
each other's eyes, pouring out their minds upon each other's 
minds, will be our World-defense. With a hundred thousand 
square miles of pictures a night, we front a world, we challenge 
the nations of the earth! 

Mr. Carnegie will stop his orgy of putting up buildings and 
will spend his money on moving-picture playwrights and on free 
and noble artists to start us off. 

Novelists, bankers, merchants, manufacturers and editors. 
Fords, labour unions and priests, Edisons, BeUs, Marconis, will 
fill in the details and do the rest. 

Not only in our newspapers, magazines, books, and plays — 
but above all in our daily trade and in the motives, methods, and 
workmanship, the moral or immoral human personal qualities 
of our exports, we will be at all points a vivid, transparent 
people revealing ourselves. Our temperament and our inten- 
tions will shine through. 

A series of self -revelations, like a great line of forts along our 
coastline, like a huge countenance of this continent, will smile 
at the world, 3,000 miles across the sea, and keep everybody 
from wanting to fight us. 

The National Smile will make other nations smile. Every- 
body recognizes this vivid personal quality in a man. And in 
the same way that a man has it, a nation can have it. In the 
same way that a man disarms everybody with it, a nation can 
disarm everybody with it. The moment a nation like this, in 
a time of strained controversy enters a room, every other nation 
will be seen quietly putting its pistol back into its hip pocket. 
This is what America is going to be for in the world. 



LOOK IV 

WHAT BEING A NEUTRAL IS LIKE 

I 
WHAT BEING A NEUTRAL IS LIKE 

THERE was a time once when if two nations wanted to 
fight in the street, everybody cleared a ring and in a 
kind of vast warm human comraderie and love of sport 
and blood, everybody stopped everything they were doing and 
stood by and looked on and hissed and cheered. There was a 
time once when two nations on this planet would say to the 
other nations going up and down Main Street: "We are fighting 
for our lives! Are you fighting for your lives? Then get out of 
our way! " And everybody as a matter of course expected to 
be moved off and went and lived in the back alleys of the world. 

America is unwilling to be assigned to a back alley of the 
world as a penalty for getting on with everybody. The rights 
of the people who cannot understand one another must yield, 
Uncle Sam says, to the rights of those who can. There is noth- 
ing neuter or insipid in taking a stand like this. There is nothing 
self-centred and provincial about it. It is understood that the 
people who have the most mutual understanding with other 
people, the most mutual business with them, shall not be inter- 
rupted in it and shall be allowed the right of way on the Main 
Street of the world. If two nations want to fight on this planet 
now, Uncle Sam says they must go out and fight behind the barn. 

This is what being a neutral is like. 

Germany and England do not seem to agree with us about this. 

570 



WHAT BEING A NEUTRAL IS LIKE 571 

They seem to feel that America, for a nation with such a small 
army, is rather presumptuous about their war. When Germany 
and England wave their hands to Uncle Sam, telling him that he 
must hurry off into a back alley or expect to be shot, what can 
he do? There are two plans to follow. 

According to one plan Uncle Sam puts his hand on his hip 
pocket and talks and walks up and down with a flourish just as 
before on the Main Street of the world and tells the nations to 
come on! This is Colonel Roosevelt's way. 

There is another way. When Uncle Sam hears the nations 
telling him to get off the Main Street of the world or he will get 
in the way and be shot, Uncle Sam stands up in plain sight as 
before and walks up and down the Main Street as before and 
tells Germany and England before he will be ordered into a back 
alley he will stand up and be shot and then, without putting 
his hand on his hip pocket, he goes on about his business up and 
down the Main Street of the world until by sheer colossal believ- 
ing and a childlike faith in the chivalry of nations he brings the 
shooting to a stop. 

Of course, this plan of President Wilson's is too original to 
be understood all in a minute. 

At first Germany and England seemed to think that Uncle 
Sam was putting on rather a grand air as to what being a neutral 
was like. We were accused of being presumptuous and original 
and of breaking out in a new place in international law, insisting 
on getting what we wanted without threats and without ultima- 
tums, through everybody's common sense, everybody's con- 
science and through the quiet assertion of our national will and 
national faith by our President. 

At last America has broken away from Europe. We have 
done something of our own in our own way. It is almost the 
first time Europe has seen us break away. 

I can only speak for myself, but it has seemed as if I could not 
bear it any longer to see our young beautiful ugly scrawny 
forward-looking Uncle Sam rolling down through history on the 



572 WE 

big automobile of the world, perched up on the rumble behind 
Europe, his long eager legs all cramped and folded away under 
him, holding on with both hands and peering and dodging and 
ducking to see what is ahead through the shoulders and elbows 
and ears of the Kaiser and the Czar and dear roly-poly John 
Bull ... all seated solidly with their wide bottoms on that 
wide front seat with the future of the world unrolled before 
them and Uncle Sam all the while, to whom it seems to us the 
future is almost personally addressed, tucked up behind on his 
little P. S. of a seat, squirming to be allowed a look! It did not 
seem as if I could bear this picture any longer, but it is the 
standard picture of history. It is the picture of us they have 
been running in Europe for forty years. It has been running 
long enough. 



But it is more than a national self-assertion America has made. 
It is the assertion in behalf of all other nations which all other 
nations if they had been placed as we, would have made them- 
selves. We have been original first because we have had the 
chance first — a chance every nation in the world has demanded 
of us as their right that we should not throw away. 



II 

WHAT BEING A NEUTRAL IS LIKE NATIONALLY 

The main working-trouble with neutrahty is, that it is always 
being presented by people as a mere duty, as a kind of resigned 
virtue, whether for a man or for a nation. 

America does not mean by neutrality a goodish, bored neu- 
trality, a general array of weak good intentions not to take sides. 

It is and always was a prettified saying about Hell, to say that 
Hell is paved with good intentions. Hell will probably be found 
to have no pavement at all. It is a soft, weak place run by 
people who do not have intentions. The fact probably is that 
the people who are bored — who are bored even by their sins, are 
most of them there. (And I do hope that all the people to a 
man, who are bored by their virtues, are there.) 

I am not presenting in this book, in behalf of my people, a 
proper, anxious or virtuous neutrality. 

I present, express, and announce for America a fierce, swift 
and passionate neutrality, a neutrality for which we are ready 
to die, a neutrality for which we are ready to be called cowards : 
a hazardous, glorious, ruthless overriding neutrality in behalf of 
a world, a neutrality which shall be for America a great smash- 
ing drive for peace, like Germany's smashing on to Paris through 
Belgium. . . . 

America's neutrality is not a safe, tepid looking out for her- 
self. It is the stand she takes at the corner of Main Street on 
this planet, where the back alley she is supposed to back into 
turns off. She holds this corner as a pass for the fate of the 
world. 

Instead of a neutrality that is keeping out of things, a neu- 

573 



574 WE 

trality in which America holds and hugs her shivering soul and 
her soggy dollars to herself, it is a neutrality in which America 
breaks away, in which a great nation lets herself go; and leaps 
out into the middle of the world. 

At a critical moment in the history of desperate nations, when 
right and wrong abandon persuasion and despair of advertising, 
when liberty resorts to slavery, and when right makes itself 
more wrong than wrong by appealing to force, American neu- 
trality wants to stand forth as a kind of peace-presence-of-mind. 
At a time when right is not clear-headed enough to define itself, 
to give an account of itself, America has determined that the 
neutrality or love of all nations we all have at heart shall be 
expressed, shall be made spirited enough, manly and aggressive 
enough to attack, to surround and to overwhelm the attention of 
a world, to assault, conquer and bear down the souls of our 
enemies, to drink up their hate, and to wipe off their fear from 
the face of the earth. America is taking the stand that instead 
of confronting a man with a Springfield rifle, it is a more capable, 
a more felling thing to do to confront a man with himself. 

We believe that the way for a nation to defend itself from an- 
other nation is to confront that nation with itself, to turn a 
thousand mirrors on it, to let it look at itself, in a stupendous, 
international blaze of light. 

This more aggressive kind of neutrality, this assault of peace 
can only be carried through as a supreme, deliberate, almost 
religious feat in the art of national self-expression, as an expert- 
engineering feat of advertising and dramatizing genius. One 
hundred consuls in a city where now we have one. A Dread- 
noughts-worth of moving pictures in every nation, telling the 
news to the people about our people every day and every night. 
A fleet of press bureaus in every nation, going forth every morn- 
ing. Aeroplanes, submarines and searchlights of poets to arouse 
and express the spirit of the people. A huge array of Mutual 
Advertising Agencies in mutually strained nations. Neutrality 
dramatized in business, dramatized in tariff. . . . 



BEING A NEUTRAL NATIONALLY 57) 

I believe we will soon have a National Commission to arrange 
competitions to pick out men of all types who can express, focus 
and embody the soul of this nation. This American National 
Commission will soon arrange for a world commission, to carry 
out the details in all lands— of what being a neutral is like. 



Ill 

WHAT BEING A NEUTRAL IS LIKE PERSONALLY 

If someone would have been so good as to publish a little 
manual for Americans about August, 1914, called "What 
Being a Neutral Is Like," and if it could have been placed 
on five million iVmerican living-room tables, and if we could all 
have used it a few minutes every day to help President Wilson 
to be President with during a world war, and to make him feel 
that we were helping, it would have made several things happen 
in American history that have had to be left out. 

Most of us in America have had very lively experiences in 
being neutrals. President Wilson said at once that it was what 
we would have to be, and we saw he was right. But we did 
not know how at once. And not many of us know how now. 

We found it especially hard at first. Reading large-calibre 
war news, marching up and down columns of it with our minds, 
and remembering we had got to be neutrals at the end of each 
paragraph, remembering that if we looked up over our glasses 
and said anything to the man near by President Wilson might 
somehow feel that we were butting in and bothering and making 
matters harder for him — was to most of us a very strenuous job. 

But the President has made every man of us feel personal 
about it. He has made us feel that in the combustible state of 
the world what was going on in each individual mind was a na- 
tional affair. 

But we are not used to feeling so important in our minds — 
most of us. We had rather got into the habit of jogging along 
with our minds modestly and unobtrusively. The average 
American man is used to feeling that what he thinks is only a 

576 



BEINC; A NEUTRAL PERSONALLY 577 

hundred millionth of the country anyway, and it makes him 
reckless. And now suddenly there appears before us the Presi- 
dent of the United States coming in every morning while each 
man of us reads and standing by each man with his finger on his 
lips, reminding him that his mind is a national mind. It has had 
the effect of making a man feel that for the present he must act 
as he sees the nation must act. Each man himself must act as 
if he were a kind of small United States. Any other attitude, 
our population being as it is, would mean war. 

To most of us this has been an exciting experience. We had 
always supposed that being a neutral was rather stupid. 

I do not want to seem to assume in this chapter that I have 
succeeded in being a neutral to such an extent that I can there- 
fore say with authority what it is like. But I have tried very 
hard, and I think I know what I am trying for, and what I am 
not trying for. 

I find this entry in my day-book about being a neutral : 

Friday, September — , 1914. 

If being a neutral means being neuter — if it means maintain- 
ing a strict unexceptionable nothingness when I am reading the 
war news, if it means putting one's soul, ice cold, into a conversa- 
tional thermos bottle, and not showing any warmth or having 
any strong gusts of feeling at all — then I am through trying to be 
a neutral. If such be neutrality, neutrality is insipid, stupid, 
and a little mean. 

What I have been trying for is something very different. And 
it has grown on me — this sense of what neutrality really is— the 
more I have tried to get near to it. Neutrality in a fight is the 
most interesting, absorbing and glorious feat a man can under- 
take. The spectacle of a great nation maintaining, in the face 
of the world to-day, a true neutrality, is as impressive a display 
of power as the burning of a city or the sinking of a fleet. 

In the first place, only a man of deep passions, of rich, power- 
ful, intelligent sympathies and desires, has the equipment to be 
a neutral or the driving power to put through such a huge spirit- 
ual engineering feat as seeing all sides, sympathizing and under- 
standing, mastering and ruling all sides, shaping them and 



578 WE 

moulding them and welding them into the Future, like a 
god. 

I have noticed that there are three men or types of men in his- 
tory who have had the heat and the light and the driving power 
in them to be neutrals. 

The scientist, the great scientist, has a passion for burning 
down through his own prejudices to the truth, whatever it costs 
or however it hurts. 

The great inventor has a passion for relentlessly pursuing all 
knowledge, blending opposite ideas and obdurate contradictions, 
taking things that won't go together and putting them into the 
electric furnace of his mind until they do. 

And there is the poet, who, whether he is a man of action or a 
man of thought, relentlessly loves humanity and will not give up, 
who will be satisfied with nothing less than possessing, under- 
standing and loving all people in his heart. 

These men are neutrals. When we know one of these men or 
read the life of one of them, we know what being a neutral is like. 

But having decided what being a neutral is like, how can a 
person be one? 

When the war broke out I was sitting at a table in a summer 
resort with a German woman who had lived only a year in this 
country and whose husband (a professor in one of our great uni- 
versities) had gone down to New York on the first train to get 
away to the fight. Everyl^ody at every other table in the 
dining-room was against Germany. We were all neutral at our 
table. It was not hard to be neutral at our table. 

I have come to believe, as I have observed human nature, that 
nearly everybody in this world would do what everybody else 
does if he came to the point of doing it as naturally and as un- 
consciously and as implacably as most people who do things 
come to the point of doing them. 

The way to think and to come to one's principles like a neutral 
is to do one's thinking in terms of people. A fellow human being 
who will dramatize our principle for us, make the principle 
breathe and smile, give to it the tears that belong with it, sur- 
round it with the death that belongs to it, with little children, 
with sons, with dead brothers, with the memories of heroic 
fathers, helps one in being a neutral. 

The best arrangement I know of in the present war would be 
for people to sit at tables and break bread with all nations. They 



BEING A NEUTRAL PERSONALLY 579 

are partlj^ wrongheaded, but they feel about their wrongheaded- 
ness as we do about ours, and they come to it as we come to ours, 
and their mistake is costing them so much, and ours is costing us 
soHttle! 

Another convenience for being a neutral, besides thinking in 
the terms of people, is thinking in the terms of the future. 

Neutrality, inst_ead of being a stupid equilibrium of sympa- 
thies or a state of indifference, really works out in the end'into a 
passionate foreseeing of what is going to happen, and sympa- 
thizing with people for the way they are going to feel. Neutral- 
ity may be said to be taking sides in people with what they are 
going to be. We put ourselves where we see what they really 
want. We want for them what they want, a little faster than 
they themselves do. Neutrality works out, in the last analysis, 
into prophecy — into seeing ahead for people to where their roads 
come together. 

The interests of fighters are all bound to converge into peace 
the moment the peace people calm down to a shrewd, quiet 
guessing on what they really want and where they are really 
going. 

To be a neutral a man goes on ahead a little. He gets to the 
fork of the road first. It seems to be our patriotism here in 
America just now to get to the fork of the roads first. 

The President is asking it of every American man every day — • 
asking him to move on. Every American is expected to be just 
now all by himself, as well as he can, a kind of small Hague 
tribunal in advance. 



IV 
THE RIGHT TO BE A NEUTRAL 

Hundreds of millions of people have left off regularly every 
day for awhile now belonging to the human race. They merely 
belong to nations. It is hard to see how it can quite be true, 
but one nation apiece is suiting them, apparently, perfectly 
well. In a day of the wireless telephone, of aeroplanes and 
radium and all our other naturally international things heaped 
up about us, for men to allow their own souls, the souls that 
have invented these big, boundless things, to be cooped up in na- 
tions, seems anaemic. One would not have believed it possible 
two years ago. 

Here is Ernest Lissauer singing and being decorated with the 
the Order of the Red Eagle for singing a song like this : 

YOU will we hate with a lasting hate! 
We will never forego our hate. 
Hate by water and hate by land. 
Hate of the head and hate of the hand, 
Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown. 
Hate of seventy millions, choking down. 
We love as one, we hate as one, 
We have one foe and one alone — 
ENGLAND! 

And now here is a just and upright poet, a straight-minded 
man, a gentle fellow, like Percy Mackaye, partitioning poetry off 
and singing a song against the Germans. 

Why should a poet, who of all men in this world is supposed to 
have something of the X-ray quality — the wireless telegraph 
quality, the freedom in him of the air, of that great Common 

580 



THE RIGHT TO BE A NEUTRAL 581 

called the sky, where the souls of nations like children all sing 
and run and play together— why should such a poet let himself 
slip into a weary humdrum attack on a single nation? 

It has seemed to me that at a time like this, a kind of landslide 
of onesidedness in the world, we should demand of a poet that 
he should have the originality, individuality and headway of 
seeing things for himself and manage to be, in spite of the crowd 
around him, a neutral. 

It has seemed to me that our poets to-day should be true to the 
larger vision, that they should be kept from falling into the in- 
tellectual illusions of the Philistines, that a poet should make be- 
ing a neutral colossal, that he should make people feel glad for 
him and envious in their hearts. It has been pitiful to see the 
poets — William Watson, Kipling and the others — all falling short 
of the larger historic spirit of their nations and falling with all the 
others into the illusion that neutrality, instead of being a refresh- 
ing, exhilarating, exalting spiritual experience, a grim, mountain- 
climbing, heaven-storming experience, a sublime fight almost 
alone for humanity, a holding of the pass for God, for the whole 
truth against the whole visible world, is a dull neuter spiritless 
thing in people who have not character enough to make up their 
minds. 

I do not understand how a poet can let himself speak or even 
sing of neutrality as if neutrality to-day in a war like this were a 
kind of faint, dreamy back-and-forthness, a moral wobble, in- 
stead of the fierce resistless energy, the birth-pang in the heart of 
man, of a new world. 

I read that the Reverend Dr. W. H. Van Allen is reported to 
have said yesterday: '* Neutrality is henceforth the refuge of 
cowards." 

It does look cowardly often. That is just it. People fear Dr. 
Van Allen will call them cowards. 

It takes more courage to be a neutral— when most people do 
not want to — than it does to fight. 

I should think any man would have to admit this who stops to 



582 WE 

think and to ask questions. Does it or does it not take more 
character not to make up one's mind to-day than it does to make 
it up? With this vast roaring Hell of Sure People raging around 
one — a hell that has only been created and that is only being 
kept up because the whole world has fallen into a kind of panic 
of infallibility, of everybody going about shooting because he 
knows — which is it that takes the more character to-day (I ask 
any candid man), to grimly, lonesomely suspend judgment, or to 
pop into certainty, explode into a monotonous, white, godlike 
perfection and completeness like all the rest? 

The one thing that is the matter with the world to-day is 
that we are having a kind of epidemic of certainty, a kind of 
bubonic plague of all being right. 

Everybody is a pope now. 

The moral rigour of being a neutral in the face of the world to- 
day calls out all the strong man's faithfulness against himself, 
all his humility and all his courage. 



V 
NEUTRx\LITY PLUS 

Many people look upon being fair as compared to being parti- 
san as uninteresting. They seem to think it is hard to make it 
exciting. 

I do not see how this can be true. It always seems to me more 
dramatic, surprising, stimulating and eventful to go around and 
see four sides of a statue than to stand still and look at one. 

I think even the Colonel would calm down in speaking of 
neutrals occasionally if he would think of what is on the next 
page. (Anyone, including the Colonel, who is not interested in 
my philosophy about this, please skip a page or so here.) 

It is curious, but if one takes two opposite ideas and carries 
either one of them relentlessly through to its logical conclusion, 
to its fulfilment, one is almost sure to get a third idea which will 
have a family resemblance to them both. This third idea or off- 
spring of two contradictory ideas is apt to be the Truth. The 
Truth is always a conception, a vision of fusion or new birth from 
what look (to many people) like a couple of lies — that is a couple 
of frightfully unfinished truths that had a mutual consuming 
desire — not to be any more unfinished than they could help. 

This principle applies to the experience of my mind with War 
and Peace. 

It is the psychological background, the psychological motive 
power of neutrality, of neutrality as a spiritual and intellectual 
experience, which the American nation has had in the last few 
months. 

Any man will find, I believe, when he looks into it, that, 
when his mind is especially waked up, he has the same feel- 

583 



584 AVE 

ing about an inexpressible idea, a huge latent unpenetrated 
paradox, that a Goethals has about a Culebra Cut, before he 
cuts it. 

The moment a man's mind really begins digging into a truth 
the other side of it from the side he is digging on pulls on him 
like a magnet. It is the Pacific, the daily vision of the Pacific 
in the eyes of the men on the Atlantic side, that makes their 
shovels fly. The harder a man works on an idea, the more he 
sees two sides. Then the more he sees two sides, the more the 
two sides make him think and make him want to work harder. 
This is why peace in a man's mind in distinction from partisan- 
ship, makes for intellectual energy. 

Peace is itself a dynamo in a mind. It whirls up energy like 
any dynamo in a power-house, by rapidly alternating opposing 
currents. 

If seeing two sides of a truth makes a man think, seeing 
twelve sides makes him think still more. Twelve national view- 
points will make a man think more than two. Of course at first 
they may make him want to give up, lie down, stop thinking 
altogether, but if he carries the thing through, it energizes his 
mind. The first and most rudimentary degree of intellectual 
energy is one-sided energy and is illustrated by a partisan. The 
next degree is two-sided energy and is illustrated by what we 
call the paradox. Then comes the three-sided energy illustrated 
by the naturalness of the conception of the Trinity, by the 
three dimensions and by the triangle. Then above this in rank 
comes the improved triangle or arch, the semicircle. Finally 
there is the circle, the highest energy — the energy of thinking in 
the complete round and of seeing all sides. 

Of course God does most of the thinking in the round, and 
naturally when a man approximates to it or rather approximates 
to it for a man, his very manysidedness very often makes him 
helpless in its first stage. We are all familiar with times in our 
own intellectual life when any manysidedness we may have 
managed to work our way around on has left our minds high and 



NEUTRALITY PLUS 585 

dry and unfit for action. This is what seems to be the trouble 
often with the Hberal mind. 

One does not think necessarily of a liberal mind as having 
the highest form of energy in a mind. This might seem to con- 
tradict my contention. But the trouble with the liberal mind is 
not its liberalness or its manysidedness. A liberal mind is like 
a top or a planet or a bicycle : it is only when its manysidedness 
is kept going that it amounts to anything. As long as many- 
sidedness is static in a man, or produces a mere wobbling motion 
in him, manysidedness is helpless, but the moment it focusses, 
the moment it whirls, manysidedness becomes the turbine wheel 
of thought. 

This is my conception of peace. It is an amazing, resistless, 
whirling all-sidedness. 

Peace is the seeing and driving together of all sides — the 
driving an idea through the whole cycle of vision. In this sense, 
the peace energy in a mind may be said to be the highest voltage 
of energy in the mind of the human race. Peace is the turbine 
wheel of the world, the drive in folks that goes with the drive 
of the planet. 

It is because the nations are too lazy to drive through to 
peace, cannot work their ideas out around peace, cannot express 
their ideas in the round, that they are falling back on huge ar- 
mies and navies and are engaged by law in drilling boys in being 
bullies. 



I might cite an example of how peace energy in a man when I 
have felt it being directed toward me works upon a hostile state 
of being. 

When I have a fighting feeling toward a man, what it really 
means— at least with me— is that I get so tired of myself and of 
the way he makes my nature conduct itself inside when I am 
with him that I believe he is my enemy and act accordingly. 

Then I find that I am dealing with a man who is full of peace 



586 WE 

energy, with a man who is not as tired of himself as I am of 
myself and who, having more energy of brain waves in my direc- 
tion, tells me decisively that he is not my enemy and will not be 
my enemy and that I cannot make him my enemy. He insists 
on feeling identified and upon acting identified in spite of me. 
He may not bear on about it perhaps at first. He may even 
begin by seeming to be as different out of politeness as I tell him 
he is. But slowly as occasions offer, he proceeds to show by 
words and by actions that we agree more than I thought we did. 
The sense of identity playing across our difference stimulates 
like the positive and negative poles, touches, draws out and 
electrifies our imagination on both sides. 

"I agree with you underneath and you agree with me under- 
neath," he seems to say. "Let's get underneath.*' This is the 
undertone of the peace energy at work. I do not see how any- 
body can call being a neutral or insisting on settling without 
fighting, a lazy or insipid undertaking. I submit that conveying 
to people what they do not know about themselves, and convey- 
ing to one's self what one does not know about one's self, making 
two* men new before their eyes, is not a pacific or sleepy process. 
It is stern, self -conquering hard work. 

This is why I speak of peace as an energy. 

This is why I know peace is coming in the world. The men 
who have the most energy possess peace — their minds work for 
peace. It is peace that makes their minds work and they will 
subdue all others. In an era of machines and inventions, of 
colossal victories of peaceful minds over earth and air and sky 
and over the lives of men — the days of weak-minded or fighting 
men, of men who are troubled with mental anaemia or hateful- 
ness, are over. They will doubtless continue to live but they 
will be crowded out of high places. They will have to fight 
every year with less and less significant people. Nobody will 
notice them and finally there will be nobody for them to fight 
with except themselves. Such a man can sit down in a room if 
he wants to alone and be ugly to himself, but that will be his limit. 



VI 
FALSE HONOUR 

If one takes a subject and puts it on a slide, looks at it nar- 
rowly and by itself, one can be very certain and very quick, 
and act on it with a fine flourish of efficiency. 

Here is the Arabic, with its eight more Americans deliberately 
murdered by Germany. 

When one looks at this fact all by itself one has at once a fine 
feeling of knowing just what to do. A hundred million people 
should go to war — the one normal sane nation the world has 
left to hold the planet together while the others fight should 
back down from its appointed position, its great, distinctive, 
lonely office of keeping the world from falling apart, for the sake 
of these eight Americans who should have stayed at home, and 
for the sake of another hypothetical eight who should be ordered 
to stay at home. 

America is the cement to-day that holds the world together. 
We have no right to fight. The cement must be cement, and 
do its work as cement. 

It is enough for America to state her position and register 
her protest and record with Germany and with the world her 
vow that at an opportune time and in a suitable way she will 
compel Germany's full attention and in the meantime dealing 
with a desperate nation fighting for its life, she will make allow- 
ances and wait until she can do something to bring Germany to 
her senses in a less idiotic, visionary and unpractical way than 
fighting, or threatening to fight. If Germany wins, she will 
need us. If she fails, she will need us still more. The time for 
us to produce an impression and make a reckoning with Ger- 

587 



588 WE 

many is when she wants us and wants what we have. We 
would then be in a position to make Germany hear, with a 
whisper, what now she would not and could not hear thundered 
at her with guns. If we state and put on record our position 
explicitly and unmistakably, there is no disgrace in waiting for 
the best time and the best way to compel a reckoning for it. 

Germany says to us, '* We are busy. We are desperate. We 
cannot listen. We do not hear." 

To give up our position of holding the world together to 
compel a desperate fighting nation, a lioness with her cubs, to 
stop and purr to us while she is busy clawing off twenty nations, 
is an academic, unpractical, humdrum, lazy, self-indulgent 
thing to do. 

Of course we feel like fighting, but what of it? We must 
keep the main issue in sight, which is the fate of a world. 



VII 
FALSE SIMPLICITY 

It is convenient, but it is sentimental, visionary, unobservant 
and otherworldly to think of men as being simple. It is also vis- 
ionary to think of nations as being simple. 

All the nations look simple very largely in Europe just now. 
A nation has to look simple to fight. America almost alone of 
the great powers is not fighting and does not have to look simple. 
It is because America does not have to look simple, and still re- 
mains open, human, and complex that it is of some use, and that 
nations are slowly turning to us. We do not exactly blame 
them for being obliged under the circumstances to look simple. 
We think we understand how each nation fell into it. 

Once let somebody blunder, once let some threatening-minded 
scared person, who is in a position to look as if he knew, tell 
everybody up and down a nation that everybody in the nation 
has got to fight, and of course the nation gets simple, whether it 
is or not — all in a minute. 

Europe suddenly confronted with eleven perfectly simple 
nations went mad, as a matter of course. Such a thing had 
never been dreamed of before — that there would be such a land- 
slide of nations all becoming perfectly simple rudimentary one- 
idea nations all in a minute. But America holds her ground. 
We look around this monotonous fagade of simplicity on the 
European nations. We see the two nations in every nation. It 
is what we are for, in the modern world just now— not to be 
fooled by fagades or by the fagade habit in nations. 

Germany may make England believe that it is simple but we 
will not believe it. England may make Germany believe that 

589 



590 WE 

England is just a simple, uncomplicated, plain, bloodthirsty na- 
tion but we will not believe it. Every nation in Europe, to us, 
is putting on airs with guns. 

We know that millions of Germans are glorying even while 
they fight in the pluck and sorrow of Belgium. And we know 
that it is natural for the moment for Belgium not to believe this, 
and to think how simple Germany is. 

We keep allowing for these things. We will blame nor praise 
no nation wholesale. When a nation goes to war the party that 
is on top at the moment automatically takes command. The 
first people a nation attacks when it goes to war are its own vast 
helpless minorities. When a nation fights another nation the 
first thing it does is to whip half of its own people. 

We keep remembering this. America stands by and proposes 
to see that the part of Germany that has been whipped by Ger- 
many shall have a chance to rejoin the nation and take its turn 
sometime before everything is finished up, or at least have its 
hearing. The war party in Germany has expressed itself, prob- 
ably as well as it knows how to, with guns. The other party has 
other means of expression and has ideas which can be better ex- 
pressed in some other way. In the meantime America hopes 
to conduct herself in such a way that she will be in a position to 
deal with Germany as if Germany knew more, as if, of course, 
Germany could express herself better than she lets anyone think. 
We know that Germany is, that Germany must be more thought- 
ful and more reasonable than she looks. 

We have the same feeling about each of the other nations. 

If we could — ^here in America — as soon as we got the chance 
we would start up some kind of organization, some campaign of 
mutual understanding which would keep the noisy superficial 
shouty and shooty persons each nation is diseased with from mis- 
representing it, from standing in front of it, in front of all the 
other people, the people in the nation that we particularly want 
to know and that want to know us — the every-day people that 
can do real things and that any quiet, sensible nation in its 



FALSE SIMPLICITY 591 

senses would want to do real things with — the live, interesting, 
up-to-date, peaceful, expressive men in all the other nations, the 
men who think and who have something to live for, the men who 
want things that we have and who have things that we want. 
We all want to get together. And we will the moment all the 
gun-brags and the gun-blowers in every nation who are flourish- 
ing around in front of all of us, saying that they and they only 
are the nation and represent the nation, have thinned each other 
out enough to think. We wait. We know that they will find 
that they cannot think without us. They will have to ask us to 
come forward and do their thinking for them. 

So we bide our time. Of course it is too soon to get the shouty 
and shooty to see it now, but it is merely a matter of time, of 
letting them have their turn and letting them use it up. Then 
we will have ours. We will begin with each of us presenting 
each of our nations with a little time, a time of waiting and look- 
ing, of seeing what it wants; we will give each nation a little time 
with itself, and give it, the people in it, time to express them- 
selves, to set one side, if they want to, their more scared and threat- 
ening-minded leaders, and to put in front of the nation men that 
really represent them. All the nations are getting ready to 
see the main truth about this war— namely, that if every nation 
to-day would take care of its own enemies at home there would not 
be any enemies abroad. Who are the men in every nation who 
are the sort of men that make enemies abroad for the nation.^ 

We will find out the names of these men and arrange these 
men. It is not boundary lines and maps of the world that need 
arranging in this war. It is people. The thing we are all going 
to agree in every nation to do, I imagine, when the lull comes, is 
to organize all human beings, all people who are trying to be 
human, whatever nation they may be trying in. We will sort out 
all the others, all the German Bernhardis, English Bernhardis, 
the French and Russian ones, the scarehead Americans, move 
them over into some special marked-off country on this globe by 
themselves— some large, roomy, safe, bare, hilly country, a kind 



592 AVE 

of wasteland that is not much good except for fighting. Then we 
w411 let them settle down there — all these waste people — and 
fight and throw themselves away at each other to their hearts' 
content. They will have their specially partitioned-off pen on 
the world to fight in and the peaceful part of mankind will spread 
out and live on the rest. We do not need (after this has been 
attended to) to bother with boundaries very much. We can 
already see, looking over the high fences of our nations, that al- 
most any boundaries for nations would do if the people inside 
them have been arranged. In the meantime, until this has been 
done, until human beings have organized being human as well 
as armies have organized being not human, we prefer to make a 
stand here in America on our philosophy of human nature. We 
will not join with Dr. Gordon in taking the w^ar as the last beau- 
tiful, simple demonstration of what human nature is like, and of 
what each of these nations is like. We are not going to be caught 
up, 3,000 miles across the sea, into the international hydrophobia. 
It is one of the rights of the world, it is one of the rights of every 
nation in Europe — every nation that has been seized with inter- 
national hydrophobia — that America should not let itself be 
seized, too, should keep itself sacred, should keep itself immune. 
We are the Red Cross nation. We will be, if need be, almost 
savagely neutral. We have become the altar people, the confes- 
sional people, and every man caught in every little pitiful self- 
deceived ugly cooped-up nation shall flee for what is left of his 
idea of a W^orld — to us. Not that he needs to come to us. We 
will stand by him at home in his own nation and where he is. 
America needs him where he is probably. America wants him 
to keep on representing the world there. We wa;nt him to feel 
we are all open to him and listening to him, and standing by him. 
Every human being who is hoping to be human again the 
moment his government allows such, things has a right to feel he 
is being represented to-day, that he is being officially stood up for 
by American citizens. Every man of them has a homestead in 
our hearts. And whatever the nations they are mixed up with. 



FALSE SIMPLICITY 593 

we wait for them . We wait for their turn and lend a hand . We 
will stand by them against the other nations, against their own 
nations, until they speak for themselves. 

This is what I mean by saying that we do not believe that the 
nations of Europe are as terrifyingly simple as they look. Per- 
haps I have no right to use the first person plural in this way, and 
say that this is our honest, actual, typical American point of 
view, but I will say at least that this is the plain human way I 
have to look at it myself. I know there are two Lees. 1 am not 
simple. And I insist, apparently against Dr. Gordon, that Dr. 
Gordon is not simple and there must be two Gordons. And 
there are two Germanys, too, and two of all the rest of the na- 
tions. This may or may not be the typical American point 
of view. I can only ask, or make this book ask, my nation: 
Do I express this nation or do I not.'^ In the meantime I believe 
that the plain millions of our people are going to make them- 
selves felt. I believe that this war is America's turn to assert 
its temperament to the world. Our temperament is our practi- 
cal philosophy about human nature. We keep a plain, una- 
dorned, unremittingly human view of things. Documents and 
diplomats and guns cannot make us blink. People keep on 
being people. They may try not to look it, but they do. Na- 
tions are just crowds of folks. All folks are partly Hyde and 
partly Jekyll. To us, 3,000 miles across the sea, there is a Jekyll 
and Hyde in every nation, and Hyde seems to be having his 
turn. 

We are taking our stand for Jekyll here in America and all 
the Jekylls, the German, French, English, Austrian and Russian 
Jekylls. 

I know a man and his wife who have had great difficulty for 
years in maintaining diplomatic relations. They separate every 
little while, and both come to me and both try to get me to take 
sides against the other. All I can ever do, I find, is to insist on 
taking sides with the best, in the husband and with the best in 
the wife against the worst in them. 



594 WE 

When they come to me in this way they are sadly mixed about 
themselves, usually. I know they will be seeing in a little while 
what they were really like. 

When a man is saying things about his wife that he will all but 
knock me down for believing three weeks afterward, does any- 
one suppose I am going to believe him? 

And here are all of these nations in Europe deeply and inex- 
tricably necessary to each other. The more they are alive the 
more and more necessary to each other they get. The thing 
America is nowin a position to do is to be faithful to each of them, 
to refuse to take sides against its best self, to make a stout, slow, 
good-natured, obstinate stand in each nation's behalf, not for 
what it wants to make us believe now, but for what it will wish 
we had believed afterward. It is going to be our national busi- 
ness, the next few months, as the papers go flocking through our 
homes every morning and every night, to make a shrewd, loyal, 
human guess on what each nation in this fight will be glad we 
had believed and said. We are to be in America world-psy- 
chologists now. We are to be the mind-readers of nations. It 
has been thrust upon us. Nobody else is giving any time to it. 
Our people are to be asked to be the poets and interpreters of the 
other peoples. New York, Chicago and Denver are asked to 
read the hearts of cities, of Paris, of Berlin and of London. 
Our cities listen to their cities and our fields to their fields. 

There is something awkward about it in a way of course. Our 
cities seem rather young and rather pert to do it. But we are 
buoyant and believe in people and expect the best of people, 
and in a way, after all, we are experts in being more like children 
than the other peoples. Jesus spoke quite literally, perhaps, 
when he said one day, "A little child shall lead them." 

It is the child after all that is the great Common Denominator 
of the World. 

Some old-man nation might do better in some ways. It 
would be so wise. But probably it wouldn't hope enough. And 
it is hope Europe wants and nuist get from somewhere now, a 



FALSE SIMPLICITY 595 

hope that burns through and Hghts up, a hope that warms the 
hearts of nations, hghts up their years, irrepressible, insatiable 
. . . a hope that has something almost terrific and majestic 
in it like the look one sees in a little child's eyes. This is what 
Europe wants and must import from somewhere or borrow from 
somewhere to-day. The roll of Niagara Falls, the crunch of the 
glacier, the sublime weight and power of the darkness of the 
night — these are nothing to that boundlessness one sometimes 
sees, that one sometimes stands on the shore of, in a child's eyes. 

Almost any child will do. Anyone can get that look. After 
I have got one, I read my morning paper. I face Europe with 
that look! 

I have seen dandelion down in the wind and sunrises. They 
have that same something in them, too, that is in the child's 
eyes. It is in all the world, and I will not believe that a world 
that is full of things like this can go wrong very long ! 

I have seen that our souls are awaking, that we are but begin- 
ning. To-day, at last, with Columbus, Copernicus, Bell and 
Marconi, we have all been waked out of our little separate selves. 
We have rushed to our windows. We look out through the 
windows of our souls upon the earth. The nations shall yet 
be to us as the voices of happy children playing in The Yard. 



LOOK V 

WHAT BEING A NEUTRAL IS NOT LIKE 

I 
MR. SHAW SHAWS 

I WOULD like to deal in this chapter with Bernard Shaw's 
endeavour toward peace which he published early in the 
war, called "Common Sense About the War." 
I might as well copy one or two entries in my journal at that 
time : 

Sunday, December — , 1914. 

Bernard Shaw's advertisement inserted in the New York 
Times and in the papers of all countries, that he is without a 
country, and that he does not want one and that he would be 
ashamed of himself if he had one, is being read to-day by millions 
of people in all the countries he might have had, or that might 
have had to have him. 

Most of these millions of people are pondering in twenty 
languages on this still Sunday morning what Shaw says about 
the nations and about Shaw and are feeling as glad this morning 
and as relieved this morning that Shaw is without a country, as 
Shaw is. They are thinking what their country would be like, 
or would get to be like with a Shaw in it. 

Only England knows. 

Monday, December — , 1914. 
{Next day.) 

I talked with this afternoon about Shaw's article. 

He tried to prove to me that it was wrong for a person who was 
always harping on peace to feel as I did toward Mr. Shaw for 

596 



MR. SHAW SHAWS 597 

having so much Common Sense about the War. He would 
not admit my accusation that the main thing the article 
brought out was that Shaw was without a country. He said 
it was full of acute ideas that England needed to have expressed 
I admitted that in a way the article was full of acute ideas but 
I said that the only idea in the article that Shaw had successfully 
expressed, the only really convincing thing anybody got out of 
the article— the only idea that everybody alike got out of it— was 
that Bernard Shaw was a man without a country, and that he 
liked it. The rest of us poor fellows, of course, have to have 
countries. Mr. Shaw does not blame us exactly. We do not 
know any better. 

So for thirty thousand words we have Shaw crowing over 
people that in a day when countries were acting as they are 
to-day no one would catch him — not Bernard Shaw — having 
a country. 

E71 route. New York, New Haven & 

Hartford Railroad, 

, 1914. 

I have been talking in the smoking-room with two men who 
got off at New Haven, about Shaw and the war. 

I have been a little puzzled and shocked now that I have 
stopped talking about it to see how my mind had conducted 
itself with regard to Shaw's ideas about the w^ar. I find that 
when I take them point by point, isolate them, disassociate them 
from Shaw or think of them as if someone else had had them, 
I soon lose the kind of unreasonable anger I struggle with. 
And yet I am sure that there is something about the very un- 
reasonableness of the anger that is sound and just and that I 
do not need to be hustling around trying to put a stop to it just 
because it is anger. I have decided at last that I ought not to be 
angry at what Shaw says, but that if I was not angry at the 
way he said it, I ought to be whipped. 

And yet Mr. Shaw makes many points I have been waiting 
to have made. I am profoundly concerned in the thought of 
any man to-day who has detachment enough to keep a balance 
and to see truth — especially to see a disagreeable truth. In 
many ways Mr. Shaw has the best endowment of any man alive 
for seeing what people wish he w^ouldn't. He is like a child 
with a new toy, with a new disagreeable truth. 

Few men could be as sure of as fine a hearing in as many 



598 WE 

nations as Bernard Shaw the moment he chooses to speak. 
There is not a man of us who could bear to see him throw his 
chance away. The moment has demanded of him another 
spirit. 

When his article first came out I tried over and over again to 
get past the spirit in which Shaw has said things to the things 
themselves. But I could not. All I could see as I read was this 
stupendous stage of this modern world, this vast audience of us 
all reaching away up around him — the silent waiting nations, and 
the stupendous godlike frivolity of the man we were watching. 

I have spent half my life, bending and twisting my mind into 
sympathies I have not had before, in squirming my inner nature 
around and in trying to imagine how people can do things, but 
this time — this last time, I have failed. 

In the most solemn hour of modern times, in the face of the 
assembled world, the faces of twenty nations rising up around 
him as in some mighty Coliseum against the sky, behold there 
appears before us Bernard Shaw — the most lonely monster of 
his time — and in the hush of a mighty breathless moment, a 
moment of the death of nations, a moment of speechless fear, 
of the still prayers of great peoples, in which we are all assem- 
bled and in which we all see the destiny of a world hanging down 
from the sky before us all, like a thread — Mr. Shaw steps out 
glibly and cuts up antics with his mind. 

I have not admitted that Shaw was frivolous before. But 
I have never seen him with eleven half-dead nations gathered 
around him and in a world-hush that would bring him out. 
One would have thought as one read, that Bernard Shaw was 
nowhere in particular, was out behind a barn in Williamsburg, 
doing handsprings with his mind, that he was keeping eleven 
balls in the air instead of eleven nations. One would have 
thought as one read that nobody was looking and that nobody 
cared, and that he was just having an off moment by himself. 

Not a breath to indicate he knew what filled the hearts of the 
men and women of his time. 

Or that he ever would or might. 

The entire planet was wiped off of his consciousness apparently 
while He gave a world ether, while He put a world on the little 
white scoured operating table of his mind. 

Then he began cutting and laughing. 



MR. SHAW SHA\YS 599 

Of course one almost never expects to hear any very lively 
peace talk. But if Mr. Shaw wanted to be really lively, if 
he wanted to stir up peace in the nations of the world, the best 
way for him to do would have been to show them for thirty 
thousand words, a kindling and a contagiously peaceful man. 

Every man knows peace when he sees it in another man, and 
he is deeply stirred by it, especially in a time of war. 



Peace is a striking state of being, a penetrating personal 
quality, an immeasurable still whirl in some people (like a 
gyroscope) that keeps them indomitably, irrepressibly balanced 
and human. 

To Shaw, peace is a theory. It is an analysis. I cannot find 
one tenth of one per cent, of peace in his essay. I can only feel, 
page after page, as I read, how peace would suffocate Shaw. He 
would be as bored as a cannon set up as an ornament in a park, 
if he was being peaceful for a minute, or even if he was con- 
ciliatory. 

Of all times, peace is in its native element in a time of war. 
It supplies the elemental converting power in human nature to 
construct a world out of. It is a spiritual precision of decision in 
conduct, an energy of insight into people. When everybody 
is fighting, a peaceful man waits a little. Then he overrides and 
dominates with peace, with the sense of the future of the fighters, 
with what all the fighters are going to see that they wanted 
afterward — sees further ahead, does his thinking in three tenses 
and three persons, saying, 'We* now, 'We' everywhere, 'We' 
always. The fighter says 'I' now. He doesn't say even 'I' 
everywhere or ' I ' always. If he does he gets caught and thinks, 
and stops fighting to think. 

If we are to have peace it may have to be surveyed and laid out 
by consulting here and there Shaw's estimates. The materials, 
the corpse, the autopsy of peace are there. He has furnished 
us a very good anatomy of a dead peace. But nobody can 



600 WE 

make a dead peace do anything to eleven very lively nations 
fighting. 

Only some man who shall see for England what Shaw has 
seen, and who shall endow his words with beauty, dignity, love 
and expectation, with a vision, with virile hope, with a challenge 
to the heroic and the generous in all nations, can defend England 
from being a fighting nation. Only a nation that can get an 
artist to express peace for it can get it. 

If the noble efforts England has put in first and last on Bernard 
Shaw all these years in trying year after year to set him in his 
place, had been differently directed, if instead of trying to man- 
age Mr. Shaw by telling him he was shocking or wicked they 
would have told him simply and quietly that he was merely a 
moralist, a Puritan turned punctiliously inside out, or a prig 
working backward, and that he was not an artist, they would 
probably have got more control over him than they ever have 
had yet. The only way anybody could ever scare or subdue 
Shaw is to point out that of course he is not an artist. Anybody 
can see it. As long as his *' Common Sense About the War" 
is written in a way that drives people out of their senses with 
wrath and makes them fight, he will have to give up supposing 
he can write. He does not know how to express himself. He 
does not make words do with people what he sets out to do with 
them. He is superficial with his words. He merely gets peo- 
ple's attention and makes them want to fight. He, himself, 
from top to toe while he is writing about how to get a whole 
world to agree, would all but commit suicide if anybody agreed 
with him. 

The state of being Shaw is in, when he writes about peace, is 
itself a state of war. Mr. Shaw himself would say that this was 
hypocritical. But this would be rather too gentle, I think, and 
an understatement. 

I speak as a champion of words, of what words are for, 
of what wonders words have worked and can work on a 
world. 



MR. SHAAY SHAWS 601 

I am not willing to let Mr. Shaw get off with his essay's being 
by a hypocrite. I say it is not by an artist— that the words lie 
down in it, that the words in it do not do their work. 

Perhaps it is this superficial quality in Shaw that has always 
kept him from being able to hold anybody's attention. He 
merely makes people notice him long enough to make up their 
minds not to give it to him. 

I keep wondering: If nobody has ever listened to Shaw yet, 
if nobody has ever given himself over, seven words in a row, to 
Shaw, why should he write about peace .^ 

Between what Mr. Carnegie has done to peace on the spiritual 
side, and what Mr. Shaw has done to it on the literary side, 
peace is having a struggle. 



Probably if there is any one particular person the devil envies 
in this world it is George Bernard Shaw. Other men put in 
bigger strokes for evil than Shaw does, but Shaw does what he 
does and says what he says in a way — right here in the middle of 
all these warm throbbing people about him — in a waj'- that 
would turn hell pale. 

Part of the time I anatomically agree with him. He often 
does what needs to be done. He analyzes in "Common Sense 
About War," here and there, as no one else could. 

And if this is so, why is it that when the devil read it over 
after he had made Shaw write it, he found he did not need to 
change a word.^ 

I do not wish to set myself up as an authority on what the 
devil thinks, and why, but my personal impression is that Shaw 
does to people with such elegance and such distinction the very 
things that the devil is trying to do to them, every day, in his 
plain, rough, comparatively humble way, that the devil finds he 
cannot keep, in spite of himself, from looking up to him and 
imitating him. He even trims his beard like him. (See Faust.) 

So when the devil looked around and saw half the people in 



602 WE 

Europe fighting, and wanted to do something that would make 
the other half of the people who had stayed at home to read and 
had not gone to war, wish they had, and when he looked the 
world over, all the authors of the world, and saw that he must 
have an article which should be itself the quintessence of war, 
that he must have a great lonely article without a future and 
without a past and without a God, by a man without even a 
country, by a mathematical, cosine, and triangle sort of person, 
with a deadly meaningless correctness about him, by a poor 
sterilized depoetized unrhythmic logarithmic man — a man who 
thinks antiseptic thoughts, who has pasteurized emotions, who 
never gives and takes, never warms or colours with human 
understanding, or with human love — he saw that Shaw was the 
only one out of us all in all nations that w^ould do. 

So a tract on "How to Be Peaceful," from Bernard Shaw — 
the most lonely mind of his time, the man who has out of all the 
world the most magnificently endowed incompetence to speak of 
human beings, to say what human beings think or what human 
beings feel, or what they can do, or what they mean by what 
they do — was presented to the struggling peoples of all na- 
tions. 

This may be a strong statement, but I have stood up for Shaw 
in one way or another all my life. He is always saying things I 
hate to believe. He has sent, year after year, red blood coursing 
through my faiths. He has given me by the sheer bleak con- 
trariness of his mind, by the fishiness and chill of his thought, 
by his remoteness from human nature, by a kind of other- 
worldliness there is in him, by a kind of aquamarine or aquarium 
quality in his mind — he has brought out for me the warmth and 
glow of my world, has made me see my fellow human beings 
moving around me up in the sunshine on top of the earth like 
heroes, like great warm-blooded giants, like little brothers of 
the gods. It would be hard to over- value the use of Shaw in our 
generation, but always as one values ammonia or sal ammoniac. 
The world needs such things, but when ]Mr. Shaw oversteps his 



]MR. SHAW SHAWS 603 

function, his biting acidulous genius, when he forgets that all 
he is for is to act as a kind of gallbladder for England, and when 
he seriously tries to set the whole world right and tell people in 
England and everywhere how they have got to be more human, 
it has seemed to me to be worth while in the present crisis to try 
to point out where Shaw is valuable and where he is not, just 
where what his mind secretes can be used. Far be it from me to 
underestimate the value of gall. I merely point out to my fellow 
mortals what I have painfully learned: that Mr. Shaw's secre- 
tions on "How to Be Human " should be used in the body politic 
just in the small modest place where Nature intended. They 
are not intended to be swallowed, or to be mixed before eating 
with human nature's daily food. 

My idea of what to do with Shaw is to accept him a little 
stiffly perhaps but gratefully, and then use him as one would any 
other valuable but very horrid chemical. I remember when I 
was a boy what wonders I could do with blue vitriol by putting 
it into a few jars with some copper and some zinc. I could tele- 
graph downtown with it and order groceries for my mother, or 
make engagements to play duck on the rock. I always used to 
wonder (as president of the Boys' Telegraph Company of Cleve- 
land, Ohio) at the way that blue vitriol in those jars made those 
two metals bite each other and warmed them up into doing 
things. This sort of thing is what Shaw is for apparently. 
Used discreetly both in America and England, he is invaluable. 
But people should keep their Shaw in jars, I think, and not try 
to use his mind as many people do or try to do, especially in 
England, in a loose general way. 

Shaw sees no future for Germany or France or Russia or Eng- 
land, or for the world, or for human nature. He really in his 
heart thinks it is rather terrible for a thing like human nature 
to have a future. He has no crowding-in, imperious vision for 
his world about him. He has never conceived or travailed in 
spirit or given birth to an idea, not even to a moral idea. He is 
at best a rather severe, childless-minded, moral old maid, who 



604 WE 

tells what is the matter with other people's children, but who 
could not have one and who would not — not for the world. 



At first I was drawn to Shaw by what I had conceived to be 
his courage. 

Even his courage, which is his most arresting and attractive 
quality, is not to be compared for a moment to Lowes Dickin- 
son's. At best Shaw's courage is like the courage of any chemi- 
cal, like sal ammoniac or any kind of cleansing chemical. It 
does not know really what it is eating into. Shaw will eat into 
anybody without particularly noticing. 

When Lowes Dickinson disagrees with people, as in "Letters 
of a Chinese Official," as in "Appearances," or as in his recent 
essay on the war, when he defies his environment, or rebukes his 
native country with the East, he does it full-knowing, full- 
counting the cost. Lowes Dickinson has courage against his 
own country in behalf of the world, and against his friends, and 
against himself. People are warm and alive. They are not so 
many dots to him, or dolls of themselves, or copper or zinc. 

His courage becomes a spiritual feat, a true victory over him- 
self and over others because it is so intensely personal, so vividly 
aware of people and of all people, that it gives a kind of gentle 
splendid wilfulness to his thought. He will not let the feelings 
of one set of people bedazzle him or blind him to the feelings of 
another. 

Dickinson's courage makes him see people more humanly, ap- 
proachably, and more universally every day. 

Shaw's courage makes him lonelier every day. 

Mr. Dickinson carries being personal so far that he comes to 
have a kind of superhuman, superpersonal, multipersonal quality 
of insight. His mind is one in which people discover one another 
or guess shrewdly at themselves. It is a little Hague Palace of a 
mind where nations sit down by the fire — no, by the Lamp in 
the light (there might be a little more fire, I think!) — and talk. 



MR. SHAW SHAWS 60o 

It's the personalness and intimacy of Dickinson's mind that 
make it the stuff peace is made of. Dickinson's mind (with 
that pale, slow, iVladdin's lamp glow^ in it) incubates peace. 

Shaw^ carries impersonality, or rather unpersonality, so far 
that he attains a kind of tableland of inhumanness, of nonentity, 
of nowhereness and nobodiness, without a soul in sight, w^here 
he lives alone with George and w ith Bernard and w ith Shaw. 



Mr. Shaw does not illustrate my idea of what being a neutral 
is like. And what I have been saying about Bernard Shaw does 
not illustrate my idea of what being a neutral is like. 

Having called Mr. Shaw^ names in this book, having called 
him blue vitriol, sal ammoniac, a logarithm, a fish, an old maid 
and a gallbladder, I am aware I have placed myself in a rather 
awkw^ard position to say w^hat I would like to about how spirit- 
ually powerful and morally superior it is to be a neutral . I can 
only express my regret that I have not yet attained that high 
level of energy, that finer spiritual voltage of neutrality with 
regard to Mr. Shaw that I long for, or wish I could long for. 
But perhaps these few pages will serve to give this little orgy of 
neutrality I have been having in this book a touch of restraint. 



II 

MR. MiJNSTERBERG TAKES A WALK 

December 



"One German up in Yonkers or out on a back street in Pitts- 
burgh can put up a better fight for Germany to-day than a thou- 
sand Germans who are merely kiUing off Frenchmen and Bel- 
gians and Englishmen way over in Europe." This is what I was 
saying or trying to say to a friend the other day when he took me 
up on it. 

The idea to which I was trying to make him agree was that a 
German in Yonkers is located in the strategic country. In the 
end the court that decides and makes awards to the nations in 
this war is to be the court of neutral nations. America is the 
leading neutral and a German in Yonkers is right on the prem- 
ises before the jury while it is making up its mind. 

My friend did not altogether deny what I said about America. 

*'But you don't know Yonkers," he said. 

He said he wished I would come up and spend the week-end 
with him. He said he would like to have me meet a German in 
Yonkers. He would like to have me have a little talk with him. 
He would like to see what I would have to say about a German 
in Yonkers and how he can help his country after the little talk 
— say next Sunday. 

** Well, I didn't say any German in Yonkers. I said a German 
in Yonkers who kept his head and who impressed everybody as 
having kept it." 

Then he brought upTlugo MUnsterberg. He asked me what 
I thought of Mr. Munsterberg's first appearance in the news- 

606 



MR. MUNSTERBERG TAKES A WALK 607 

papers after the war broke out, of the way he lectured America 
that first memorable week. 

I said I knew plenty of Germans who were keeping their heads, 
who were doing Germany, with every person they met, a great 
deal of good. 

I said I was sorry about Mr. Munsterberg's first week. I 
thought perhaps Mr. Munsterberg was. Everybody's first 
week was rather bad in this war. 

My friend replied that he didn't believe Mr. Munsterberg 
had begun to be sorry yet. He didn't think I would find many 
Germans who were, either. Of course if ever there was a time 
when a German going about the streets of America was entitled 
not to keep his head, it was that first week. I surmised that 
a man who has as good a head as Hugo Munsterberg, on a special 
occasion that could only happen once in two or three thousand 
years, is entitled not to keep it. Certainly there are very few 
of us in America who were running wildly around the streets 
those first few days when Germany was apparently wiping 
Paris from off the face of the earth who are in a position to be 
censorious with Mr. Munsterberg about his head. We were 
enough to make any man — any German man at least — feel 
queer. 

Mr. Hugo Munsterberg, who, by the way, many of us are glad 
to see is now being paid six hundred thousand dollars a year by 
Harvard for being its Professor of Psychology — that is, the 
interest on ten million dollars Harvard said it would rather 
let go than give him up — has done a very great deal since he 
came to America some years ago to make being a college pro- 
fessor in an American college look interesting. W^e are more 
than glad, most of us, that Harvard felt that six hundred thou- 
sand a year for Hugo Munsterberg (with or without his head) 
was cheap as compared with having it known that Harvard 
University would not let him be himself, or that it took orders 
from a millionaire, and it does us good to think that Hugo Mun- 
sterberg is here and that he is an American. It is in his capacity 



G08 WE 

as a German that I am driven in this chapter to take issue with 
him, and humbly venture to make a text of him. 

Being a German in this country just at present is a very deh- 
cate and exacting business, and as several million Germans are 
attempting every day before our eyes to do it in the best possible 
way it can be done, and trying to be Americans at the same 
time, and to make Americans understand Germany and to repre- 
sent Germany to Americans, it may not be amiss for me to dwell 
on one or two points. There were one or two things Mr. Miin- 
sterberg made happen to my mind during his first week that have 
a hopeful bearing on the art of being a German in America. 

First. When Mr. Miinsterberg came out with his letter in 
the papers I wished he were in Yonkers instead of Cambridge. 
(It's like being allowed to talk to the jury through a megaphone 
to be at Cambridge.) 

Second. I couldn't help thinking that after the first day 
or so anyway probably the German Government wished Mr. 
Miinsterberg was in Yonkers instead of Cambridge. Of course 
Yonkers or anywhere would not do any good now. After he has 
once broken out, after he has once, all in one morning, burned 
it or branded it into the American mind what the modern Ger- 
man may be, probably with many people, must be like, it is too 
late for the German Government to transfer Mr. Miinsterberg 
to Yonkers, though if it could really manage to do it, if it could 
really have him for a modest sum like six hundred thousand 
dollars tucked quietly away in Yonkers, it would be a good bar- 
gain for Germany and for the ultimate peace of the world. 

Third. As it is now, all that anybody can do or that any 
German can do is to prove to everybody by the way he acts and 
talks himself that the overriding spirit in which Mr. Munster- 
berg writes of England, France and Europe is not a fair picture 
of modern Germany. 

Big events that determine the fate of nations do not turn on 
facts. They turn on tones. In the last analysis they turn 
on air. They turn on how people walk. They turn on how 



MR. MUNSTERBERG TAKES A WALK C09 

people carry themselves. What the Allies are fighting or think 
they are fighting to-day is a Strut. 

Fair-minded Americans three thousand miles away, who are 
being appealed to on every hand, have heard a very great deal 
first and last about this Strut. They have been trying very 
hard not to believe it until they have to. The enemies of Ger- 
many have been telling us, '*You don't see it. You are three 
thousand miles away." 

Then suddenly Hugo Munsterberg, a German gentleman liv- 
ing as one might say in a prominent intellectual brownstone 
front on the intellectual Fifth Avenue of the world, is seen emerg- 
ing from his front door quietly with his big stick in his hand and 
his moral silk hat on, and with all America — Washington, Los 
Angeles and Chicago — lined up on the curb all the way down 
the Avenue from the top of the hill in Central Park to the Wash- 
ington Arch — he Struts! 

yir. Carnegie, looking out of his window on the corner of 
Ninety-second Street, blushes. The Public Library and the 
Brick Church look on gravely astonished. The busses, with all 
their little audiences on top, crane their necks and buzz. In 
Washington Square four hundred sleepy citizens on benches 
rise respectfully and stand before him and watch him. They 
regard him solemnly, thoughtfully, like a mile of policemen 
going by. 

Of course after a great scene, a monster demonstration like 
this, a kind of national pageant of how Mr. Munsterberg feels, 
all of the would-be, half -desperate, doggedly fair-minded people 
in America who had been sajang all along that the German strut 
was one of the island illusions of England, or one of the Boule- 
vard provincialisms of Paris, found it very awkward the next 
day meeting people in the streets. Everybody said: "Say, look 
at the Strut ! That is it you see ! That is the way all Germany 
feels. That is what Germany is like! Germany is one big, 
long, wide, overbearing parade of Munsterbergs. Germany 
is Munsterberg raised to the n^^ power. The strut of his in- 



610 WE 

dignation across America is just a small imitation of the strut 
of all Germany across all Europe." 

What can anyone say? What is there anybody can do? 

Three things occur to me: There are ten million Germans 
in this country. Every tenth man, woman, or child one meets 
in America is a German. Every one of these Germans is in a 
position to prove without going out of his way and by just letting 
people know him that even during these days of supreme trial 
and provocation, as he goes and comes amongst us, strutting is 
not a German trait. It is not for nothing that in these days, 
when the American jury is making up its mind, every tenth man 
in America is a German. If every German will do off nine 
Americans, will keep the nine Americans next to him wondering 
at the way he keeps from strutting, it will not take long at the 
rate of nine men apiece to every German before America will 
see things fairly. 

There is one other thing that can be done. Every man of us 
who belongs in one of these nine that some German has got to do, 
can help by being fair and by walking softly. 

Incidentally, too, no doubt the Germans themselves, while 
they are working on us, can put in a little side-work on one an- 
other. Any German strutting that has got to be done they will 
arrange to have done privately and among friends. 

One other word. It does not seem in all our war talk now 
that very much encouragement is being held out for anybody to 
be meek. Moses himself would strut just now probably. It is 
only fair to admit this in speaking of Mr. Munsterberg's walk. 
Probably a great many of us— most of us — if we had had a 
prominent intellectual brownstone front to take the walk from, 
as he did, if we had had the things to put up with from 
Americans that he did and that all Germans do every day — 
would have taken a walk. I am not blaming Mr. Munsterberg 
in this chapter for taking a walk. I am merely pointing out how 
it worked. iVnd I do wish for one that, for quite a little while 
now, he wouldn't take another. 



Ill 

PROFESSOR WALZ CALLS A MEETING 

I read in my paper a little while ago that Professor Walz, pro- 
fessor of German literature at Harvard, had called a meeting of 
the Germans of Massachusetts to organize the Germans as 
Germans to take action in the next national election. The 
announcement as reported in my paper was made to look very 
threatening and boastful and I read it with sorrow and anger 
and with what people call (when it is theirs) righteous indigna- 
tion. I started to write a letter to the Republican (which I 
locked up in my desk) . It began like this : 

The one single ostracism, the one single colossal, imperious 
intolerance of the American people is going to be toward any 
race that seeks as a race through organized political action to 
threaten or bully or dominate the country. 

As the open hearth of the world, the trustee of the liberty of 
all religions and of the welcome of all races, America will not 
believe that on second thought the German-Americans of the 
country will trifle with America's trust in Germans in this way. 

If Germans seek to make by political conquest a worse aggres- 
sion upon America than merely taking American territory, if 
they seek to bully American ideals with German ideals, they will 
have to reckon not only with America, not only with American 
men, but with men of all nations throughout the world who have 
a personal interest in the personal freedom of American men to ex- 
press their ideals. While men in other nations may not live here, 
they at least think here and let their souls out and pray here. 
If Germany wishes to pick out some sure way of facing financial, 
social and industrial ruin, of being shut off the planet, and 
crowded down in under it out of sight of the sun, all she has 
to do is to encourage German-Americans to act as a unit, in 
threatening the individual and personal willsof American citizens. 

611 



612 WE 

The whole world will rise in defense of America. 

America, the one great nation of welcomers and beckoners, 
the nation which stands on its wide shores and greets the un- 
known, whose face has shone upon the despised and upon the 
forgotten of all nations, is not going to be swerved from its high 
destiny in the world by the threats or by the political bullying 
of any one race it has welcomed. Any race that seeks to take 
treasonable advantage of America's generosity, its gusto of good- 
heartedness, to try to force it backward into the ruling and politi- 
cal ideas from which America has helped it to escape, is going 
to meet an outburst of patriotism, of fervid ostracism, of social 
and business annihilation such as has never been dreamed of in 
the world before. 

Germany herself will soon be holding back German-Americans 
if they attempt to use organized conscious, political action to 
disturb the innate, organic mutual understanding, the political 
ideal and social and racial balance of American life. 

It is racial insanity and world treason for German-Americans 
to seek to act as a political unit and to attempt to bully a free 
people into their personal ideals. If they want their personal 
ideals to control this country, they must behave in such a way 
and be such a people that they will make us all want their per- 
sonal ideals to control the country. 

As a matter of fact, this is what in a very large degree, until 
a few German-Americans have been made insane with the 
German crisis, they have been doing. 

All we ask of them is to keep on doing what they have done 
before. 



I wish to make a confession to the reader. 

These last two paragraphs were not written the morning 1 
read the announcement that Professor Walz had called his 
meeting of the German voters of Massachusetts. 

They were written the morning after a long meeting behind 
closed doors had been held when, according to the report in the 
Republican y the German- Americans voted not to take action. 

Of course I was thinking when I wrote it, that this letter of 
mine to the Republican was on neutrality and about neutrality. 
But I was glad I locked my neutrality up. 



ACT IV 

ELEVEN NATIONS ASK US 

The War Loneliness 

The War and I 

Reveries on The Back Step of a Trolley 

Crowds Compare Notes 

Eleven Nations Ask Us 



THE WAR LONELINESS 

IF EVER in all its history this little planet needed another 
planet to confide to — needed another planet looking on, 
another planet that would hang about near by, and tell us 
frankly what it thought of us — it is now. 

The next best substitute for this would be some man on this 
one who could present us with a nice cool two thousand years 
from out of the past, for nations to stand still a second and see 
themselves in, or some one quiet-hearted man with tears and 
laughter in his eyes, looking a couple of centuries ahead, who 
could make the nations hush a minute, look over his shoulder 
a minute, and look all together at To-morrow — and To-mor- 
row. ... 

Here are the poor sick noisy-headed nations running gestur- 
ing about, throwing up their arms like poor insane patients 
in a huge Sanitarium twenty-five thousand miles around. Even 
the vast, quiet, indifferent oceans have lost their heads and are 
filled with hurry and fear, and the huge silent Vacant Lot of 
the blue Sky is filled with nations, with the evil spirits of na- 
tions flying, scurrying about in it. Voices of hate whisper and 
throb through little white clouds. . . . 

We are walled in out of the universe, shut in with our own 
hatefulness. I go out at night on the meadow before I go to bed 
and stand and look up at the sky, at that wide wheeling radiant 
company of worlds, and it does not seem as if we belonged in it 
any longer. ... It makes one very lonely. . . . 

The reader has noticed it, probably. The night you knew 
the Lusitania went down, did you look at the sky that night.^ 
How quiet were the other stars ! 

613 



II 

THE WAR AND I 

I have been very much puzzled during the war to know what 
to do with the newspapers and with the things the newspapers 
liave been doing to my mind. They seem to keep on doing 
things to my mind whether I am reading them or not. I keep 
reading yesterday's papers over and over in my sleep and I 
dream I am reading to-morrow's. 

I feel some days and some nights as if sometime in August, 
or about August, 1914, I had apparently mislaid my mind. It 
seems to be way off somewhere quite separate and away from 
me where almost anything that wants to happen to it just comes 
along and happens to it. I do not seem to be allowed exactly to 
be connected with my mind any more. Any incredible thing 
that wants to comes drifting out of Nowhere and grabs it, sucks 
it up into it, by a kind of capillary attraction, like a fly on a 
ceiling. I believe it tamely. 

I have always had before, as everybody has, I suppose, a 
certain mental attitude I am used to, toward a world. Day 
after day I go about vaguely now. 

I feel as if I had mislaid a world. 

The other day, after reading the war news in the morning, I 
broke away. I decided that I had let things go in this way 
about long enough. 

I went up on Mount Tom and looked back at .w^hat had been 
happening to me. I saw how it all was from a distance. I had 
been eating and drinking and breathing war. I had been buying 
ten papers a day. I read in the streets, and I read while I ate. 
If there was a new headline, the people I was with dropped off 

614 



THE Wx\R AND I 615 

the face of the earth. My whole being was scooped up and 
drunk away those first weeks with war. 

Now and then I would forget for a minute perhaps. There 
would be a group of us, and we would be swept off into a gale of 
laughter about nothing. Then suddenly I would see men rolling 
dead bodies up a hill to fight behind those cold still entrench- 
ments, or I would wake in the night out of deep sleep, and re- 
member and listen to a roar three thousand miles away. I 
thought of the gay little flaxen-haired children I saw playing in 
the streets of Cologne, now crying as if their hearts would break, 
and of the silent mothers. 

I read at meals. "If I have time to eat I have time to read 
about the war," I thought. Why should I know whether 
there were peaches or cantaloupe on my plate .f* 

While I was up on Mount Tom I faced the situation. I began 
to think what was going to become of me if I kept on very much 
longer letting my soul get away from my body and get away 
from me like this. 

There must be some sense, some direction and human mean- 
ing to be drawn out of all the things the newspapers were mak- 
ing happen to my mind. 

When I came down from the mountain I recorded a vow or 
arrangement with myself in my journal that I would see how it 
would work for one week not to read a fresh paper at all. If I 
felt that I had to read something about the war, I would read 
something I could find my way in. I would go back to the older 
papers, read the quieted-down news — news three months old, 
news that was seasoned and that had fallen into order a little. 
If worst came to worst, I could read the early August and Sep- 
tember papers about the war when it first broke out and see if I 
could not possibly by this time make some human meaning out 
of them which I could really use to live with and to understand 
the world with. "Things can keep on happening if they want 
to." I find in my journal: "I will not tackle this morning's 
paper or yesterday's. It merely makes me unconscious. It is 



616 WE 

like taking ether to read each fresh morning's grist of all these 
incredible things that keep happening over and over, one after 
the other, that one cannot make a beginning, middle or end of. 
News never changes much practically from day to day — all 
these unspeakable, monotonous duplicates of nmrders, a kind of 
conventionality of killing people. 

"It all comes not to mean anything after a little like reading 
the genealogy chapters in Genesis." 

I would almost rather die myself than read lists of killed 
and wounded every morning as if they did not mean anything. 
The only fresh human live thing one can do to fend off the 
hellish deadness, the unspeakable crime against one's self of 
being bored by dead people, of being put to sleep by the heaped- 
up sorrows of a world, is to stop to assimilate, to put in order 
and make sense and thought and action out of the sorrows one 
already has. I do not want to read about eight hundred more 
men going down with one roar shut up in a great steel box in a 
footnote, or between spoonfuls of grapefruit — this vast conven- 
tionality of horror, this sing-song, this bottomless drone of death. 

I take up my paper and read five incredible things a minute. 
If I could forget twelve months, smash back into my last year's 
mind, read my paper with that, I would be getting sixty incredi- 
ble things a minute. Here is one "from an illustrious person- 
ality" in the Deutsche Tagezeitung about the Lusitania. 

"At last our submarines have executed a great coup which it 
is hoped is to be only the beginning of such attacks unless Eng- 
land and America suspend sailings altogether. We Germans 
rejoice to the fullness of our hearts over this successful stroke. 
We have only a cold smile for the common cries of anger aroused 
by the torpedoing of the Lusitania. Under no circumstances 
must we cease our methods until this villainous Uu^tion of shop- 
keepers has been fought to a finish." 

Or I read that Germany arranged an official holiday for 
school children when the Lusitania went down. What shall I 
believe.'^ I know in a way that in ten, twenty, fifty or a hun- 



THE WAR AND I 617 

dred years there will be something to put with these things I 
seem to see and that I seem to know, which will bring me to my 
senses, but in the meantime for the ten, twenty and fifty years 
how am I to live in this helpless craze of doubt, wondering, 
and ignorance and what kind of a fellow human being shall I 
have to allow myself to be? 



After breaking away from the newspapers and snuggling up to 
my journal for a day or so and trying as well as I could to strike 
a balance with the world, I woke up enough at last to see at 
least for myself, what to do next. Slowly I got away from feeling 
lost with myself and feeling lost with the world. 

I went deliberately to work to try to find out what it was 
that had been happening to my mind, and I began to pick out 
one after the other the things that had been happening to it, 
put them in some sort of order, decide what they were, and de- 
cide what they were for, and what I or what anybody else could 
do with them. 

I began at first doing this just for myself. I began day by 
day as the news came in, taking it up and seeing what it did to 
me and what it did to my world, or rather my two worlds, the 
one I have and am used to, and the one I am trying to get. 

I have been writing it down day by day as it comes. And 
this book which the reader has been going through, at least in its 
spirit and on the inside, is a kind of journal. I have tried to 
tell in it the inner story of one man's soul struggling with a 
world war, and talking back to a world war. 



Finally it has occurred to me that I could not be the only one 
who had felt as if he had been dreaming since the war broke out. 

Perhaps my way of finding myself will work for other people, 
too. 

I have been going about doing the things that I usually do. 



618 WE 

but it has seemed to me all the time to be somebody else that was 
doing them. I was just tagging around. 

"Who was it?" I asked myself. "I am going to find out." 
Then I began taking an inventory. What have I been letting 
the war do to me? 

The sun is rising as usual. The chestnuts are ripening in 
the trees. Gasolene keeps making wheels go around. Elec- 
tricity is on the job all day and all night. Cocks crow and dogs 
bark and horses go by in the street. Everything is being itself 
and fulfilling itself and quietly making the world go around — 
except me. 

Then it came over me that it was about time, with a great 
absorbing event like a world war going on before my eyes, that I 
should be of some use. Reading all day and all night about dis- 
asters that are happening to other people does not help them 
much. 

I had been reading about a war for months as if I were in the 
middle of some huge, interminable, idle, helpless dime novel. I 
had been profoundly and hopelessly absorbed day and night, but 
I had not helped the characters in the novel. There must be 
some way of reading news about a war which would put one in a 
position to help. 

It was then I began to wake up, apparently, thinking how I 
could help. I began thinking out my own personal relation to 
the war, the relation of the war to my vision of human nature, 
my vision of the next hundred years, and my vision for my own 
people and for the world. 

It made an amazing and immediate difference in my reading of 
the war news when I began to slow down my reading and to 
try to see the relation of what I was reading to my vision of 
human nature and of the next hundred years or the next ten 
years. 

Everything became steadied. I spent less time finding out 
what the news was, and I spent more time finding out the news 
about the news, in determining for myself what the news was for, 



THE WAR AND I 619 

and where it belonged, and what logically it would do with me 
and with a whole world. Most of all, I asked, what is this news 
going to do with us —with us in the United States? And how are 
we going to assimilate it, understand it, and act on it? 

With this point of view in mind, this searching behind the news 
for news about the news, I am beginning to get some satisfaction 
out of reading about war. Instead of being sucked up against 
the subject and flattened out into not knowing who I am, or 
where I am, or what I am doing, I am steadied into action. Per- 
haps the way to help is to think, and to think first, and to get 
into the habit as soon as possible of knowing what I am about. 

Perhaps this experience of mine in reading war news has some- 
thing to do with all of us. 

I know it is a helplessly tragic thing to say; but the most 
important thing that is happening in the world to-day is not 
what is happening to the men in the battlefields of Europe. 
It is what is happening to us. 

All that they can do is to kill each other. They cannot de- 
cide anything by killing each other. They can decide, possibly 
(which has nothing to do with the subject), which can kill the 
most. But even then, having spent two hundred thousand or 
four hundred thousand men on each side and fifty million dollars 
a day to decide who can kill the most, nobody, except those who 
are dead, will be in any position to help. The dead will help 
because they will be through fighting. 

They will be quiet and strong and assured. They will call 
out reverence and love. That will help. But the Hving will 
not help. They will be helpless and useless because they will 
be filled with rage for five hundred years, with the weakness and 
helplessness of rage. 

We and the other neutrals will have to decide the matter. 
And the way we decide, the ability we are to have to sit in 
judgment on the fate of a world, will depend on what is hap- 
pening to us now from day to day while we look on. 



G20 WE 

It will depend upon the spirit and the insight with which we 
look on, upon the deep, still fairmindedness, the daily hope, love 
and prayer, the daily fighting for truth, with which we read our 
daily papers. These are the influences which will make us strong 
when the real battle comes, the battle which will put away the 
giant-little, roaring-futile, helpless battles like the Aisne and 
the Marne into darkness and forgetfulness, that mighty battle 
in American thought, on American soil, that is soon to come for 
the peace of the world, for the continued existence of fearless 
men upon the earth. 

It is our American battle that is going to settle things. 

How are we daily schooling ourselves as we look on.? How 
drilling our hearts to wisdom, to self-control and quietness, 
reading the temperaments of the nations, keeping close in spirit 
to each, making them feel it and know it, so that they will turn 
to us at last as the only power on earth that can afford the world 
a breathing place .'^ We must prepare ourselves in thought and 
action to make America the clearing-house of all peoples. We 
will make our Capitol at Washington a kind of temple to which 
the tired nations may come to think and to pray. 

Then we shall save them, in their weariness and fear, from 
destroying themselves when they are too tired to destroy one 
another. 

A great many things are happening in our minds while we 
read up and down our columns of battles — mighty faiths and 
indignations and hopes, and mean little unbeliefs. A great 
many questions come, questions about human nature and about 
the world. It is the mighty daily task of xVmerican men to-day 
to pursue and face these questions, to arrange in our minds what 
is happening to us and make our hearts ready to readjust a 
world, instead of reading one more rumour, or one more twist or 
turn in a rumour, of another blind, helpless, useless wasted 
battle. 

Battles always have to be taken back. Only men who under- 
stand, who possess themselves and love others, do things. What 



THE WAR AND I 621 

other men are doing we might do. But God has given us three 
thousand miles of open sea. What America does with that open 
sea, its perspective, its freedom, its youth, joy, sunshine, its 
mighty -heartedness, shall be the self-expression, the communion 
of America with all the peoples of the earth. 
God save America for the world! 



Ill 

REVERIES ON THE BACK STEP OF A TROLLEY 

I jumped on to a car in Springfield yesterday and rode for 
awhile hanging on to the back step. There were four other men 
on the step, and we got down and stood on the ground to let 
people get out and in. 

After a little I moved inside and tried hanging on a strap. 

While I was hanging I thought. 

The car was collecting five cents from me for my standing up 
and five cents more from somebody else for the seat I might 
have sat on. 

And the fare recorder above my head kept snapping hopefully 
away, pocketing all these dear people's money with a brisk little 
chirr and a hearty little ring. 

I looked at the fare recorder critically. I wondered if any- 
body besides me had noticed it — noticed it carrying on in that 
gay mocking way with everybody standing up. 

Nobody seemed to be noticing. It seemed to be a very pleas- 
ant enjoyable occasion. Everybody was good-natured. Of 
course we stepped on each other's toes and lurched our shoulders 
at each other, and sat in each other's laps, and put our elbows 
in each other's eyes a little, but everybody loved everybody and 
felt peaceful. 

And all the time the fare recorder above our heads was singing 
its beautiful little song, " Five-cents-more-gone ! Five-cents- 
more-gone ! Fivecentsmoregone! 

And the yellow car full of yellow light, a kind of dull, happy 
glow of folks going home to supper, rolled and purred its way up 
the big hill. 

622 



TROLLEY REVERIES 623 

I tried standing on my other leg and suspending myself by 
my other arm. I tried looking up and down the aisle. I 
thought I would see if I could make out any difference between 
the kind of people who got seats and the kind of people who got 
— what I had. One could never have constructed a philosophy 
about the Seated and the Seatless in this weary world from that 
car. There was no philosophy in it. Everything had just 
happened. There were many men who were sitting. Some of 
them looked tired and some of them looked as if they could not 
get tired if they tried. One man I watched was very large, and 
was getting ten cents' worth of room they could be charging 
somebody else for. I thought how happy that somebody else 
— or to speak strictly, that two fifths of somebody else — would 
be if it was I instead of the fat man I saw sitting down. 

And all the time as I stood and hung and swayed and thought 
I heard the voice of the Corporation up above my head singing 
"Five-cents-more-gone! Fivecentsmoregone ! Fivecentsmore- 
(joneT^ 



When I got home last night and was sitting by my fire in my 
slippers, and the big clock I live with was ticking and ticking 
away as if nothing ever mattered or ever would, I fell to think- 
ing again of the street car in Springfield. 

It came over me gradually how much that street car meant, 
what a deep, wise and rather wonderful street car it was. 

No other country in the world could have produced a street 
car like that. 

I felt a little rebuked by it when I thought about it. The 
street car had apparently — all when I was not knowing — held me 
up quietly, good-naturedly, while I was in it, made me stand per- 
fectly still and laid over on me an Idea ! (It takes about seventy- 
nine people to make me have an Idea.) 

As I sat by my fire I recalled all the faces and the attitudes of 
those people I had been with in the car, and all the while that 



624 WE 

gay mocking little fare recorder up there above their heads sing- 
ing to them sweetly of the seats they were paying for that they 
hadn't got, and it came over me what it would have been like if I 
could have taken all those people that were in that car and sud- 
denly put them out and put in Englishmen instead. 

London could not produce, not if it tried a thousand years, 
a single street car and fit it up with people like that. Paris 
and Berlin and Petrograd and Tokio and Hongkong could not. 
They would not even believe that such a street car fitted up with 
people like that could exist, until they got into it, paid five cents 
in it, hung on a strap in it, and thought. 

All jammed full of kindness and hope. A kind of small 
neatly packed-up rolling America. The Money singing and 
singing away for dear life up over their heads and people stand- 
ing and joining in the chorus. Inconvenience and joy. 

Anybody who came over to this country and wanted to see 
America and see it soon, should at once be shown into a street 
car. . It is the combination of discomfort and irrepressibleness 
that brings us out. Nobody ever knows us by sitting down with 
us in parlours. To know Americans squeeze them. Then see 
them smile ! Put them in some place where they cannot get in 
or cannot get out. Then see them act the philosophy they can- 
not talk, and live the religion they think they do not have. 
When I come home from London, where every man wears his 
rights like a chip on his shoulder, and see our street cars, all full 
of crushed and happy people, these wronged and joyous spirits 
all overflowing on the cars and hanging on and dripping off, I 
thank God I am home again. 

So as I sat by my fire last night and felt rebuked, I thought 
what a wonderful street car it was I had stood up and found fault 
in, and thought about myself in, and about how thin I was, and 
about the rights of thin men. 

It was a deep and wise street car. Elijah's chariot looping 
the loop and making a great idle useless glorious lonely flourish 
in the heavens, was nothing to that Springfield street car bowl- 



TROLLEY REVERIES 625 

ing jovially along up the hill— not as a sign of the times or a 
prophecy of the world. Elijah's being grabbed decorously and 
caught away in the heavens all alone was not so essentially relig- 
ious aswhat had happened to me that afternoon — all for fivecents. 

An Englishman who was visiting in New York the other day 
arrived an hour and a half late at a dinner uptown. Everybody 
had waited for nearly an hour. He was so distinguished they 
had to. Finally when he came in and was asked why he was 
late he said that when he went down to the subway station at 
Thirty-fourth Street at six o'clock every car that came by was 
full of people standing up in it, and he waited for a car to come 
by with a seat. 

I have my enthusiasms about Englishmen, but they do look in 
a bus like so many bullets in a bottle. Two Englishmen have 
never been rubbed together since the world began. Nothing 
has ever rubbed off of one Englishman on to another. It is a 
part of his religious ideal to keep from being rubbed. 

The main spiritual secret and glory and power of America is 
that crowds have souls in it. People blend into one another and 
run together. They love one another in the streets. An irre- 
pressible forgiveness, a great mutual hope hangs over the smoky 
cities. We breathe expectation. Christmas and sunshine are 
in our veins. 

So as I sat by the clock and the clock ticked and the fire 
crackled last night I was rebuked by the happy yellow car. 

I like to think of the streets these last nights before Christmas, 
of all the crowded street cars bowling by wishing everybody a 
Merry Christmas. 

The sense of identity— probably that is what Christmas is. 
A huge You and I. All on the same planet! All on the same 
car! God bless us! 



When I am feeling hostile and feverish and am suddenly con- 
fronted with a smooth-natured, big-natured man's mind, what 



626 WE 

I feel at first is his mind quietly surrounding my mind. I storm 
around and hit out more or less possibly, but there is so much 
room in him that everywhere I hit what I was supposing would 
be a wall in him, I find there is nothing there; that his boundary 
line is further off. His range runs way around mine. 

This is the way the American national genius of mutual ex- 
pectation, the moment that even a small fraction of it is ex- 
pressed, is going to defend us and keep any quarrelsome or 
feverish nation from dragging us into war. 

The American nation has been drilled by its immigrants, by its 
habit of welcoming and understanding people, its power of wait- 
ing and reconceiving people, and its way of seeing daily within 
its own boundaries old nations born again, has acquired almost 
even by the mechanical action of its national life a habit of think- 
ing all around a subject and all around a man before fighting 
and making up its mind. America is the most egregiously slow 
nation to call anyone an enemy in the world. It keeps gentle 
and big-spirited. It stands with a kind of loose, shaggy good- 
nature protectingly, hopefully, like a huge national Newfound- 
land dog toward a fretful nation, a nation nagging eternally 
about with its little funny roars, yaps and ultimatums. It 
looks upon a nation that regards itself as an enemy as sick, as 
crippled and helpless, hysterical, and as deceived by itself, 
America settles down in its huge, obstinate healthymindedness 
and waits. 

I do not like to speak self-righteously for my people but with 
geography and history to help us and with no special credit to 
ourselves, we have acquired a kind of national slow-burning 
quality, and unless the heart of our people is betrayed by false 
leaders, the nations will naturally turn to us as the umpires of 
the world. Our destiny lies in searching our hearts and making 
ready. 



IV 
CROWDS COMPARE NOTES 

I want to say a little about the national failings of three na- 
tions and of what promising failings they are — the American, 
the English and the German failings. 

The things that are the matter with us, with any one nation 
of us, properly mixed and put with what is the matter with the 
others, would make out of any one nation of us all what we hope 
to be for ourselves or for the world. It is not by fighting and by 
being more different, but by trying to be more alike that we are 
to become great. 

The nation of all that does the most team-work with the other 
nations and does it first, will be the greatest. 

Naturally in certain important particulars at least America 
is my candidate. 

Perhaps as I am deeply and more or less searchingly interested 
in what a German expects of Germany and in what an English- 
man expects of England, our German and English friends will 
allow a plain American, as long as he keeps his sense of humour, 
to hope and pray, and with definite details, for America. 

Of course with the Englishman, England is the candidate, and 
the German offers Germany. 

But in the meantime, before anything is determined, it may be 
well, after noting what our respective national powers and fail- 
ings are, to consider which of these three nations has the best 
prospect of being first accepted as the leader by the others. 

My feeling about America is that our spiritual vice as a people, 
the vice which seems to be produced by life in our new continent, 
is likely to be our strong asset in taking our position as a We- 

627 



628 WE 

nation among the nations of the earth. Our over-blending, 
colour-running, run-in-together minds, the thing about us for 
which we are criticised and sometimes dreaded, is going to be- 
come, when subjected to implacable world-action and duly 
subdued and toned down, our special national gift and special 
service in the family of the world. The American power of 
partial racial de-individualization, the power of distilled person- 
ality, of penetrating a crowd, or a vast mass or cold lump of per- 
sonality and making it over in a flash into a huge unit of a thou- 
sand entities, our power of making a crowd of a thousand souls 
become a new spiritual atmosphere or climate of men and women, 
a great cloud of rain or snow or mighty heat or burning of peo- 
ple, our American way of precipitating a crowd into singleness of 
thought and action — is naturally the strongest point and the 
leading trait of an immigrant nation. We are as a nation asr 
sembled in a few minutes. We are as a crowd in the streets from 
the four corners of the earth, all acting as one man. This is go- 
ing to be the reason as time goes on that I see or seem to see 
eleven nations asking us ! 

An English crowd is round, and shaped a good deal like a 
bomb. If one were to take all Fleet Street and the Strand from 
St. Paul's to Trafalgar Square at any time, crumple it all up in a 
flash, into a single crowd, in about five minutes or as soon as it had 
time to go off, all the people in that crowd would naturally ex- 
plode apart. An English crowd (when one really gets one) ex- 
plodes into individuals as a matter of course. 

This is why (any nation would have to admit it) the only 
really safe crowd on this earth that anyone knows of is an Eng- 
lish crowd. It is safe because no Englishman proposes to be 
mixed up with any other Englishman more than a minute if it 
can possibly be helped. 

If one were to try to crumple up Broadway, all the people on 
it, say at ten in the morning, a vast mass of running-around 
good souls, all going along lonesomely and absentmindedly with 
their eyes straight ahead, it would get one acquainted with 



CROWDS COMPARE NOTES 



620 



America very quickly. If one were to try to crumple uj) 
Broadway from the Battery to the Times Building to-morrow 
morning, one would find that all those people instead of explod- 
ing apart would explode together. They would explode in 
instead of out; they would make in a minute a solid, red-hot, 
indistinguishable, single mass of humanity. Their souls are 
made to be exploded into one another. It is all a matter of 
natural crystallization. An English crowd is round, and 
shapes itself like this — like a bomb : 



f f 



X > 



\ ^f 






/» 






K \ 



\'>^ 



^ 



^ ^ 



X/ 



1i~ 



^/ 



^ 



itf 



1^ 



A^ 



X 



<i^ vHv 



^ ^ 






\i\ 



^ 



1^ { 1 \ ^ 

4rV 



V\ 



English souls are all born outward bound. 



630 



WE 



An American crowd is wedge-shaped, and any force applied 
to it only drives all of it together, further and harder together. 



An American crowd is like a cartridge. 

A German crowd is shaped like a .hammer, with the Kaiser 
for a handle. 



3 KAISER 







ooa 

ODD 
DDDD 

aaao 

QODO 

DO oa 
Dooa 
aaaa 

DDDO 



b 



Germans allow themselves to be placed in neat orderly squares 
fitting closely together, where they can be easily handled, but a 
German crowd, unlike an English or an x\merican crowd, has no 
intrinsic bottled-up nitroglycerine of its own. It is just a square, 
splendidly massive, unconscious, stupendous iron-end on a 
handle. 

Of these three types of crowds, it is easy to see that the 
American crowd — a comparatively new invention in human 
nature, over here on a new continent — constitutes the most 
sublime and terrific form in which human nature has ever been 
put up. 



CROWDS CO:VIPARE NOTES 631 

A German crowd is comparatively safe because it can be 
counted on and because it has a handle. An English crowd is 
comparatively safe because the first thing an English crowd does 
is to blow itself apart. An English crowd explodes into not 
being a crowd. An American crowd blows itself into a thousand 
thousand smithereens of being more of a crowd than ever. 
Every smithereen of individuality or particle or eon of every 
single man in it, is flaked off of him and melted down and then 
blown into one central single hard amazing mass of the as- 
sembled atoms that have been exploded off of other people. 
Nobody exists as precisely or even approximately himself when 
he is in an American crowd. You touch a man on the elbow 
but he is not there. And why should you shout in his ears? 
You are shouting into a blank hole of a million million unidenti- 
fiable, indistinguishable atoms that have been blown off of 
other people and exploded into him. Why speak to him at all? 
Why howl into the ear of his conscience? He does not exist. 
He has gone. He is not there. He has disappeared as an in- 
dividuality. You might as well address yourself to the gas or 
the smoke coming out of the top of the chimney of the crema- 
tory where the body and the soul of an individual man have 
been burned up. 

The only difference is that in a crematory this gas that was 
once a man is in a chimney and floats harmlessly into the air, and 
in a crowd this gas that was once a man, this smoke of a soul 
given up, becomes the most powerful explosive for good or evil 
that was ever known. 

This is the sublimely bad or sublimely good side of our Amer- 
ican run-in-together genius or natural way our people from 
everywhere have of converging. One minute I worship it and 
another I dread it — this radium power we have of bringing our- 
selves together. 

Beelzebub has always been an anarchist before, until he came 
over to America. We have all come here, and all our fathers 
have come here to get together and flow into one another and 



632 WE 

run and blend and create a new world out of selected pieces of a 
thousand old ones, and our whole genius as a people is a converg- 
ing or cooperative genius. It comes to us naturally in this 
country to invent the trolley system, and to be pulled home to 
supper by the same engine all together, and it comes to us 
naturally to invent the trust, the run-in-together idea of in- 
dustry which is simply the central power-house idea applied to 
business. The English, when they travel by rail, shut them- 
selves away from each other in small compartments, and suffo- 
cate to be by themselves, and we, even in our parlour cars, are 
all rolled fondly up in a row together, and prefer being bowled 
along in rows together to hell or to heaven. 

I am putting it just as it is. We are being bowled along to- 
gether to hell or to heaven. The way for Americans to get to 
either place and to get there quickly is in a crowd. Nobody has 
been seen in America for the last forty years going to heaven 
alone, or going to hell alone. 

I say this both as a criticism and as a prayer. It sings in my 
heart one minute and curses the next. 

When I have looked across the water and have watched the 
great swirl or panic of nations, I have seemed to see the same 
principles and phenomena at work. 

Under the extraordinary stimulus of fighting for life and for 
self-preservation, we have the spectacle in England of an Eng- 
lish Crowd, of a whole nation, acting like an American Crowd. 
The German Crowd, too, has become like an American Crowd, 
swayed by the one same colossal emotion of oneness in fronting 
a world. The same is true of France, Belgium, Austria and 
Russia. Every nation at war in Europe to-day has suddenly, 
under the sublime stress of self-preservation, focussed itself and 
is showing all the characteristics, the We-powers and We-dan- 
gers of an American crowd. 

The war has made the crowd in each nation self-conscious. 
It has made America self-conscious. But in America, gathered 
from all the world, to be self-conscious is to be world-conscious. 



CROWDS COMPARE NOTES 633 

All the world is in our hearts; and when one crowd over in 
Europe falls in fury upon another crowd, the crowd in America 
has been waked out of its sleep into a fierce neutrality, into a 
massive self-consciousness, into the sublime, passionate interna- 
tionalness, into the world-love out of which, bone and sinew, 
blood and music, ideals and religion, America is to be made. 



So in America to-day, by our crowd-genius, by our national 
gift thrust upon us by fleets of ships, of making nations run to- 
gether, of making all nations as one nation, we find our nation 
placed at last without our asking and without our being asked, 
suddenly and almost by force, in the position of what might be 
called the official peacemaker of the world. 

The peace of Europe that is to be, already flows in our veins. 
The peace of Europe is in our speech, in our very accents. The 
peace of Europe lights up our faces in the streets. 

Anybody can see it. Anybody can meet the peace of Europe 
any day — in the sunshine, going back and forth smiling up and 
down Broadway. 

The Peace merely has not got to Europe yet. It had to come 
over here to start. It had to be conceived and born here. And 
now at last do I see in America Peace grown up. In this all-na- 
tion-in-one-nation that is ours, peace fronts the darkness and the 
chaos of a world. 

I believe no Englishman will blame us long for seeing this. 

I believe no German will blame us long for seeing this. 

We see it in behalf of England. 

We see it in behalf of Germany. 

It is our patriotism for a world to see it. 

Daily I go out and look in the faces of the crowds in the streets. 
I could not live a day without the thought of them, or without 
the thought that somehow before I die I shall see at last these 
crowds express themselves in America and express the world. 

In their dumbness and in their might, in this strange new 



634 WE 

world of ours, with the high mountains and the vast prairies, 
I have seen that crowds shall lift their faces, shall speak for all 
the crowds, and for all the peoples of the earth. 

In this solemn hour of the earth's history, while we are all 
standing in our crowds every hour, every day, watching the 
crowds in the older nations fighting with death — ^we the happy 
and strange children of the West — it has some days seemed to 
me as if the ends of the world had fallen upon us. It has seemed 
as if the world for the next one hundred years had been handed 
over to us as some mighty trust. 

In all the history of this sublime, comic little human race, 
straggling across its little planet between birth and death — if 
ever there was a time for a crowd to lift itself up to its fate, to 
lift itself up to a sublime and high destiny in behalf of all na- 
tions, to face its God — to search its own heart — to govern its 
own will — and to make crowds at last strong and gentle and 
quiet-hearted and sane and at home in the world ; that time is 
now. 



V 

ELEVEN NATIONS ASK US 

The Eleven Nations never intended to ask us. They would 
have broken out laughing, all of the eleven nations would, two 
/ears ago, if anyone had suggested that they — the eleven na- 
tions — would ever be asking us for anything, or that they would 
be asking us what we thought. They never have asked us be- 
fore what we thought. And they have never wondered a min- 
ute what we thought about them or what we would, or what we 
might. 

Europe has never really noticed us before. There was a 
little flurry of noticing us for a few days when we were not 
whipped by Spain, and again for a little when Mr. Roosevelt 
sent the fleet around the world, but not until the other day, 
when the nations of Europe fell to fighting among themselves 
and were literally driven at last into having some world left to 
refer to and to appeal to, did it really come into their heads what 
that world was — that we were the World — that by their own 
actions the World had petered out and simmered down to us ! 

Since then everything has been different with the governments 
of the world, when they think of us or speak to us. The Embas- 
sies bow, the Press Bureaus rage or walk softly, or coo to us, 
whichever way suits best. 

The governments of the earth have noticed us. 

The peoples had noticed us before. The peoples of all these 
proud governments had noticed us — peasants by their firesides, 
mothers writing under lamps, sons, uncles, cousins — all the si- 
lent, humble peoples had had us and had our cities and our fields 
trooping through their thoughts and through their hopes and 

635 



636 WE 

fears. They sent their children to us. The people knew us. 
How often have I heard them — the peoples of that older world a 
few hours out from New York — greeting us, praying for us from 
the sea, singing to us in the holds of ships! 



The process of peace in Europe when the panic of fear and 
shooting is over is going to be essentially a process of assimila- 
tion. 

So far as people are concerned, assimilation may almost be 
said to be an American institution. 

We are reeking with national faults and there are certain de- 
fects of temperament that anybody can see we have. But the 
national power to swallow in America, the power to stow away, 
to make into national bone and sinew whatever comes, the 
amazing greediness and efficiency our nation has shown in build- 
ing up tissue out of impossibly opposed elements, stands out as 
perhaps the most astonishing and the most crushing feat of vi- 
tality, of sheer, splendid, lusty humanness the world has seen. 

It is this lustiness, just now, which is going to prove to be, 
it seems to me, America's first great service to the world. If 
there is what might be called one We-country on the face of 
the earth, it is America. We say I and We in America with 
everybody. We are the door openers between the peoples, the 
understanders, the listeners. We are the gate-keepers between 
nations and between races. We draw close. We feel identified. 
We are a million Walt Whitmans in our hearts. Walt is at the 
dock in America. No other nation has a Walt Whitman. 

So eleven nations ask us. 

We have often made mistakes and we have often gone too far, 
but such as it is our national genius is the genius to converge 
people, to draw people together into ourselves. 

It has come to be like a mighty unseen driving force across all 
modern life. America is the huge whirling Social Gyroscope of 
peoples on the top of this planet, which is steadying it. It sucks 



ELEVEN NATIONS ASK US 637 

the nations together. It steadies the hills and seas and the 
hearts of the people. It keeps the nation right side up. There 
is somethmg about it, about this driving force of welcome, of 
opportunity. No one knows what it is, but it has prepared in us 
a kind of international temperament. We have been rehearsing 
for three hundred years to be the peacemakers of the world. 

I look over in spirit at Europe from Mount Tom. I see 
eleven nations, the Germans and the Irish and the English and 
the Italians, and the Poles and the French and the Russians out 
in the fields all night, all day, killing each other. I look at New 
York. Then I see the eleven nations, those same eleven nations 
in New York! It is like a small vision or prophecy. The thing 
can be done! 

New York is itseK a vast daily cyclorama or spectacle of the 
peace of Europe. Germany, France, England and Russia are 
engaged all day, every day, in New York in getting acquainted 
with each other and doing things together and getting on with 
each other. 

The nations in Europe have to get ready to form The United 
States of Europe. 

Europe has got to do with her eleven big nations what New 
York has done with her eleven nations in miniature. 

New York is full of melted-down Germans, Italians and 
Russians all melted into the People. 

America is the symbol of the hope of the world because in 
America international cooperation, inter-racial cooperation is 
the daily habit, the daily necessity and fulfillment of every 
American's life. 

Every true patriotic American is a little Europe. In his own 
heart and mind, his business and his religion, he is living over on 
a small scale the future of the Old World. He is a small working 
model of what the great continent over the sea from now on 
proposes to be like. 

Of course, to-day, as I write, the Old World like some huge 
Titanic seems to be tipping itself up, driving itself, with one long 



638 WE 

roar and crash, into the sea, but when it raUies and recovers 
what will it do? All Europe is going to devote itself — its 
colleges and schools, its priests and statesmen, its great stores 
and rolling mills, kings and factories — to trying to see how 
much it can be like New York. The typical American works 
down through himself and through other people in this country 
and gets what he wants. He came over here or had his grand- 
father come over here, to live a larger life, to fulfill and express 
himself. Team-work is a part of his process of self -fulfillment. 
He likes team-work. Team-work is not a theory with the typi- 
cal American. It is his instinct and daily habit, his way of 
living and even of earning his living. The main fact about the 
typical American is that he gets Iiis living out of getting people 
different from him, and different from one another, to organize 
their differences and act together. 

This is why eleven nations ask us. We would rather they 
would not. They would rather not, but as they are all being 
driven to it at the rate of fifty million dollars a day, as they 
are all converging on America as on some great Four Corners of 
the World, as they are going to bring us into a great crush of 
deciding things for them, it is good to think that in spite of our 
crudities and limitations, our people have acquired by our daily 
habit of living, of earning our living, a kind of human many- 
sidedness and limberness, openness, a kind of crowd-mindedness, 
a get-together temperament which will make us more fit to act 
perhaps than at first thought either we or the world would havp 
hoped. 

What the fighting nations are all daily at work on, is to see 
which of them can lick the other. 

What the United States is daily at work on as the leading 
neutral, is to see which side has a right to lick the other. 

Right is going to be the determining principle in the European 
situation because it is the only principle that will work. The 
General Staff principle that might makes right, will have been 
tried and failed. Nobody, and least of all the nations that have 



ELEVEN NATIONS ASK US 639 

tried it, will believe in it or want anything more to do with it. 
And they are going to turn to us by common consent the mo- 
ment they come to themselves, because we have never beheved 
it and because we stand almost alone on the face of the earth as 
the headquarters of not believing it, as the authority in the art of 
getting might and of arranging and handing out might, on the 
principle of right: that is, upon the principle of what is practical 
and of what works in the long run. 

We do not make any special pretensions. We might do in- 
finitely better, and we are deeply chagrined because we do not. 
And we freely admit that it may be our geography and not our 
souls that has brought this course to pass. But at the same 
time, if any nation that is all tired out and used up in believing 
that might makes right, were to look around to-morrow morning 
and try to find some other nation to stand by it, while it tried to 
get of some other nation what it wants by proving it is right, in- 
stead of by proving that it is big, it would turn to America as a 
matter of course. 

Probably the one single thing that this moment all the nations 
of Europe can be said to agree on is the core of America. In 
spite of the hurt feelings of the belligerents toward us, they be- 
lieve that at the core America is peace-sound, that America has 
a peace-way of getting things which they would not admit of 
any other nation or of one another. WTien they are through 
trying their way, they all know they are going to try ours and 
that they are going to ask us to stand by and be neighbourly 
while they try it. 

So we see it coming to pass before our eyes. Every humdrum, 
stupid, monotonous, bygone school history battle they fall into 
over in Europe is bringing it one day nearer. The great, silent, 
watchful, bloodless battleground of Europe is here. Eleven na- 
tions struggle with our souls. Their fate is in our conscience, 
and in our understanding, and in our love, and their songs and 
their dead faces are lifted up to us ! 

Our function is shared with all the other neutrals— with Hoi- 



640 WE 

land, Switzerland and Spain, but with our two oceans to keep us 
peaceful, to protect us and to cool us off, with our big distances 
to give us perspective, we are more powerful and free to help, 
more equipped by temperament, more crowded with personal 
representatives from all nations, more ready and eager to under- 
stand and believe the best, and therefore to do the most, for all 
concerned, than any of the others. And it would be a crime 
against history and against ourselves for America to-day not to 
silence her national soul, not to listen reverently, humbly to the 
cries of the nations to her plains and to her mountains, not to 
prepare herself in daily thought, make herself ready with solemn 
faithful daily self-control, with love, shrewdness and faith in 
others — to be the gently, relentlessly disinterested, trusted peace- 
maker — the Little Brother of the world. 
We are not worthy of it, but we will try. 



ACT V 

THE PRESIDENT, THE PEOPLE, AND THIS BOOK, 
ALSO THE COLONEL 

The President, The People, and This Book 

The Courage to Understand 

The Will to Be Understood 

Fear-Surgery 

A Few Operations 



LOOK I 

THE PRESIDENT, THE PEOPLE, AND THIS BOOK 

I 
THE PRESIDENT AND THE PARLOUR CAR 

THE President feels as deeply as anyone about America's 
self-expression and about America's defending itself by 
looking as if we were ready to shoot. 

People who have a definite proposition naturally crowd up to 
the White House and flock in around the President — say they 
are the country first. People who have no counter-program to 
offer except objections naturally stay away. 

And they stay away from their Congressmen. 

The armament program which has been outlined by Mr. Wil- 
son has been put forward as an inquiry of the people. 

The only possible way in which President Wilson or any other 
President would have the right to make a revolutionary, contra- 
dictory move for this nation would be to make it as an inquiry 
of the people. 

"You have not shown that you have thought of a better pro- 
gram or that you would back me up in a different one. In 
the meantime, here is this one which is being loudly called for. 
Now is your time to say what you think of it," Mr. Wilson seems 
to be saying to the people. No President could say otherwise. 
A President who finds himself heckled daily with men who are 
afraid, with men who have been infected and caught away with 
the orgy of self-defense now going on in Europe, is naturally 
obliged to let the scared people in the country have their way. 

G41 



642 WE 

One always tries to be considerate at first to the people who are 
most scared. And unless the people who are not scared in 
America can back up their program, which seems to many to 
be a mere negative vague program of not being scared, by 
definite reasons, by proposing a shrewd, expert, highly organized, 
highly definite campaign of getting the attention of all nations 
and making, in this moment of forty frightened peoples, a blow 
or a shock of common sense and fearlessness upon the world, the 
humdrum program of looking terrible, of having a big armament, 
will have to go through. 

America is not going to be effectively fearless in a general way. 
We can only be fearless by facing out one by one definite fears 
and misunderstandings, with a definite appropriation for dredg- 
ing them out of people's minds, by undertaking an assured, 
scientific, persistent engineering feat of excavating from our- 
selves and from hostile nations before everybody's eyes the cause 
of their fears and ours. 

If Mr. Wilson is the President of a scared country, he must 
have a policy that goes with scared people and that people who 
are feeling scared can instinctively and automatically carry out. 
Just at the present writing the President is probably feeling a 
little like the porter of a parlour car when somebody in the car 
makes a faint hopeful move and seems to believe that air ought 
to be allowed in it. I have often brooded on the porter in a 
parlour car and the way he always acts when a great moral crisis 
like being allowed to breathe or keeping other people from 
breathing is brought before him. Why is it that when there 
are two kinds of people in a car — the people who are afraid of 
breathing and the people who are not afraid of it — the por- 
ter with unvarying suave monotony all over this land is seen 
taking sides with the people who feel that air is improper.'^ 

It is because there is something roomy-minded about people 
who like outdoor air and they are willing to keep still and to give 
up. They sit and smother hopefully. And the people who are 
filled with fear, who run through life everywhere they go, in one 



THE PRESIDENT AND THE PARLOUR CAR 643 

perpetual tunnel of being chased by draughts or of being at- 
tacked by a chance to breathe, are the final and infallible arbi- 
ters and rulers of the Invisible and of the Powers of the Air 
with the Pullman Company of Pullman, Illinois. 

I have seen in this way cars all my life, a row of memory of 
them since I was born, earful after earful of people stewing 
lovingly, of people wrapped away in their own old breath, of 
people sitting in a kind of mist of dumbness and patience while 
one unconquerable dear sweet little monster in a kind of drown- 
ing grip of fear enthralled and held the porter in her grim and 
breathless spell. 

Other things are like this. 

It is because the plain, calm, busy, fearless men of this nation 
with a margin of vitality and sanity have not hurried down to 
Washington and shut down nervously around the White House, 
that the President has concluded for the moment that our people 
to-day are too scared to want to try breathing, too scared to be 
willing to try freer, more modern outdoor air methods like 
advertising and have deliberately chosen to depend on walls, 
gunpowder and forts, that they have given up living and mov- 
ing about a free-limbed, open-aired, open-eyed people and feel 
better to shut the windows of the country up tight. 

I have often had a wild feeling in a parlour car — (there is 
always something about one that gives one longings for the wild 
and primitive) — that the next time I wanted air I would stand 
up in the front of the car, call the car to order, make myself 
temporary chairman, and put it to a vote whether or not we the 
people who were in that car, and that that car was for a hundred 
miles, believed breathing should be allowed in it. 

I have somewhat the same feeling about my native country 
at the present moment. I am getting up in the car in this book. 

Who are the people and how many are there of them who 
believe that this country can be defended by self -revelation, by 
self-expression, self-confession and self-reform and advertising, 
and who are the people, and how many, who do not? 



644 ^YE 

I have believed that when the program of this book is placed 
before the people and they once begin rallying around an at- 
tention-engineering campaign, around the idea of an Under- 
standing Army, as vigorously as Mr. Hearst and Mr. Roosevelt 
and Mr. Gardner and the other more scared, more red and loud 
militarists have rallied around their shooting one, no one will be 
happier to make advertising and national self-expression the 
main reliance of his program than the President. 



I daily keep making myself remember every morning as I sit 
down to write these final chapters that Mr. Wilson this same 
morning while I am invoking him as President is engaged in 
being Mr. Hearst's President and Mr. Roosevelt's President and 
ninety million other people's. There is no reason why he should 
be cooped up into being mine. (Of course I cannot help at 
odd moments harbouring the thought that possibly Mr. Wilson 
would feel let out in being mine as compared with being Mr. 
Hearst's or being Mr. Roosevelt's.) But however this may be, 
I am very sure that if by any chance these ninety million other 
people in America who are a little less forward than Mr. Roose- 
velt and Mr. Hearst, who live more dumb and thoughtful lives 
and are more unexpressed, should suddenly prove to be expressed 
in this book and should give Mr. Wilson reason to be sure they 
are, Mr. Wilson would be ready for them. 



II 

THIS BOOK 

America's most characteristic poet — a kind of homely work- 
ing poet of course, when he was telhng people what he was for 
in the world put it like this : 

"I lead the present with friendly hand toward the future. '"* 

When Walt Whitman spoke in this way of the present, of the 
men he had about him, he had on his poetry-working clothes. 
He was doing something. 

Naturally a man's belief in people cannot be of very much 
working value or have any real grit or poetry in it, unless it is 
immediate, unless he believes in somebody in particular at a 
particular time, believes in the men who are about him and be- 
lieves in them now. 

A poet may not believe in everybody alike, but there is usually 
a place he can find in every man to believe in, and he can hold on 
to it and use it from hour to hour and day to day. He can find 
other places he can evoke and believe in and use to-morrow. 

But of course if the situation is immediate, he has to pick out 
and put first and put ahead of others the men who have the larg- 
est area of hopeful places. 

I am hoping in my way to live up before I die to Walt Whit- 
man's attitude toward America. Certainly if I could not, while 
differing with him, keep on saying We up to the last possible 
minute with the kind of President we are having now, every 
page of this book would mock me. I believe not only that Mr. 
Wilson sees the truth of the things that I am saying and the revo- 

645 



646 WE 

lutionary and immediate force of their truth, but that he is 
going to be ready to act as if they were true the moment the 
shghtest demonstration is given by the people that they are ready 
to back him up in carrying my program out. 

The President knows that any humdrum conventional move 
of national defense like our having a big army or navy is going 
to be immediately checkmated by every one of the nations we 
are afraid of. The President would admit that we could not 
hope to take them off their guard with it — with an old familiar 
out-of-date device like a navy — as we could with a stupendous, 
original invention for defense, like advertising, in which, as the 
nation that invented advertising, the nations already feel that 
they may be less practised and less resourceful than we are. 

I do not know that people in general are to blame to-day for 
not relying on advertising as a national defense or for not think- 
ing very highly or very seriously of advertising as a business. 
They naturally judge the advertising business and advertising 
men by what they have already seen of them, and as advertising 
men so far are only seeing and only doing about five per cent, of 
the business they might be doing, and of the attention engineer- 
ing that anybody can see needs to be done, there is no immediate 
reason aside from the present crisis of the nation and the world, 
why advertising as a science of national defense or as a fine art 
of national expression, should be spontaneously thought of or 
put forward first by our people as America's substitute for 
shooting or for looking as if it were going to shoot. 

As I do not wish to generalize, I will try to suggest what I 
mean by advertising as a fine art in the next chapter. 



Ill 

OVERALLS 

I have waited this morning quite a Httle before beginning this 
paragraph. When I am writing a book and finish a chapter and 
find myself suddenly up against an idea in the next one that I 
feel I never can really express all by myself, I begin the morning 
waiting. It is all one seems to need to do some days, to sit very 
still a minute by one's desk and listen to the Country. Some 
days it has almost seemed as if the country must be knowing in a 
vague general way how much I was needing to have something 
happen in it that would express my idea for me. 

Then, before I know it, Something, somewhere between San 
Francisco and Boston, gets up softly and happens, and I find 
that the country has arranged to act out for me, and put on the 
stage before everybody for me, what I am trying to say. 

And now here is John D. Rockefeller, Jr., this morning in 
melodramatic overalls, with the Associated Press, the United 
States and the miners, all looking on, taking a pick and digging 
coal in his mines in Colorado! 



Some people will think probably that it is cheap for Mr. 
Rockefeller to try to get an understanding with his workingmen 
in this way. 

But it is not cheap if it is sincere. And if Mr. Rockefeller 
is sincere, he can prove it. 

It is easy for complex or less simple-minded persons to point 
out how skilfully little Mr. Rockefeller may manage to mean by 
his overalls. 

04.7 



648 WE 

Of course, if he stops being dramatic and brings himself up 
short just with overalls, he may soon wish he had stuck to plain 
gentlemen's clothes. In the meantime, we do not want to sit in 
judgment either on Mr, Rockefeller's overalls or intentions. 
We realize that the more dramatic an action is, the more 
details it suggests, the more carefully the dramatic details in it 
have to be followed up. It is only fair for us to wait and watch 
and see as time goes on how Mr. Rockefeller's overalls strike in. 
If it turns out that Mr. Rockefeller has kept overalls on long 
enough really to begin being like a miner at heart, if it appears 
that Mr. Rockefeller is not thinking he is through, is not content 
with a nice, comfortable, smirchy face, with a mere veneer of dirt, 
an outside look or poetical flourish of labour, if he is not hoping 
with a little faint elegant perfume of sweat to deceive his men or 
hoodwink himself — if he follows his overalls up with such actions 
that he will not need overalls on to be believed, actions that will 
make his workmen believe in John D. Rockefeller, Jr., even in a 
frock coat, even in a silk hat — Mr. Rockefeller will soon be in 
a position to precipitate an industrial revolution, a kind of land- 
slide of mutual understanding between labour and capital, of 
mutual efficiency, of national impregnableness and material 
power, loyalty and mobility, that America has never dreamed of 
before. 

The same little jog of skill, the same use of some picked-out 
word or action, which people have seen producing a landslide of 
good will between two hostile classes in a nation can then be be- 
lieved in and can then be used to produce a landslide of under- 
standing between two hostile nations. Mr. Rockefeller will 
have precipitated and flung upon the minds of all men in America 
the best, cheapest, simplest, and yet most colossal device for the 
peace of the world and for the eventual, eternal guarantee of 
peace between nations of which any nation has ever dreamed. 

In the meantime, looking at the matter as it now stands, Mr. 
Rockefeller's little one-act play in Colorado, his deliberate idea 
of going out to his men, of being himself out loud with his men. 



OVERALLS 649 

has really worked. The miners have seen him in the flesh and 
looked him in the eyes, have backed him up almost to a man, 
have adopted his plan of cooperation, and the war in Colorado is 
at an end. 

So far so good. 

The people of the United States may not believe in advertising 
and in getting the attention of men who are acting and feeling 
like enemies, but if the representative of the biggest, most hate- 
fully regarded and most noticed fortune in the world believes it 
and forthwith proceeds before all our eyes and before their own 
eyes to advertise and dramatize his enemies into his friends — the 
moment is swiftly at hand when America will undertake to de- 
fend itself from its enemies in other nations in precisely the same 
spirit and method with which Mr. Rockefeller has defended him- 
self from his enemies in this one. 

The secret of power in business is the power to express one's 
idea to others. 

There is always a specific way which can be picked out and 
used in which a nation as well as a man can dramatize an idea 
and express its real self. 

The secret of power and prestige in a nation is its power to 
express its idea to others. 

To express an idea, take one per cent, of it and dramatize it, 
lay it out in three dimensions before the people and express it to 
the five senses. 

Overalls are as cheap for a nation as they are for J. D. Rocke- 
feller, Jr. And as overalls were cheaper and better for Mr. 
Rockefeller than threats and militia, they would be cheaper for a 
nation than ultimatums and armies. 

This power to dramatize a part of an idea in business so that 
people will take one's word for the rest of it and believe the rest 
of it which one has not got dramatized yet, is also the secret of 
efficiently conducting the business and the affairs of a modern 
nation. Dramatizing part of an idea so that other nations will 
believe the rest of it is an exact national science. 



650 WE 

This is the most priceless kind of science a nation can have. 

It swings all the hinges of the world. 

The men who have this power are going to command the 
business and rule the ideas of this country. 

The nations that have this science and that spend money on 
cultivating and using it as they would spend money on an army 
or navy, will soon have no problems of self-defense and will be 
defended by a world. 



IV 
THE NATION'S WAY OF PICKING PEOPLE OUT 

The object of fighting (see small boys anywhere left to them- 
selves) is to determine which is the fitter man to lead. 

For a considerable time in the history of a boy, or of a world, 
fighting, as a matter of fact, speaking roughly, really results in 
picking out the fitter man to lead. 

But one great revolutionary thing has happened in the world 
now and this is no longer true. 

Machinery, and the team-work that organically goes with 
machinery, have not only made the world too small and too inti- 
mate to fight in, but they have totally changed the world's ideas 
of the world's fittest man and the world's way of picking him 
out the fittest man. 

If Judge Gary and Mr. Frick were to take off their coats, 
clear a ring about them and begin punching each other, to deter- 
mine who should be chairman of the Steel Trust, nobody would 
suppose for a minute that the one who punched the other's 
face the best would make the best chairman for the Steel 
Corporation. The condition of the punched faces would not be 
regarded, except by a mouse or by a house-fly looking on, as 
having any bearing on fitness for managing the world's steel 
supply. 

When the only machines men had in the world were their own 
bodies, the ability of a man to manage his own machine so that it 
could whip other people's machines, picked him out as the best 
man, but now that men fight with machines the men who have 
the most inventive minds are the best men, and now that we do 
business with business machines or organizations of men called 

651 



652 WE 

corporations, the men who can touch the imaginations of men, 
rather than spoil their faces, are the best men to lead. 

The nation that can pick out the words and actions that can 
advertise best and that can dramatize best will get the most re- 
sult for the least effort and the least money and will automati- 
cally lead all the others. 

America has no need to fear for long the victory of Germany 
(if this kind of Germany is really Germany) over the world. 
She can only win that victory by having her inventors specialize 
on machines for spoiling faces, and as only second-rate inventors 
are interested in inventing ways of spoiling faces, and as these 
inventors will be the ones that Germany in her specialty will be 
able to encourage, Germany will soon kill off, starve out, or drive 
into other countries her more up-to-date and important inven- 
tors, and will have no means of creating the wealth, of capitaliz- 
ing the variety of opportunity and imagination and occupation 
which make a nation irresistible. 

The imagination of a nation is its spiritual power, and a nation 
which depends on its physical power to defend itself instead of its 
spiritual, will soon have no kind of power except the kind of 
power it uses, and the only way a nation can hope to have spirit- 
ual power is to use and use grimly, courageously and with stu- 
pendous effect the spiritual power it has. The more a nation 
uses its imagination to defend itself and to serve other nations — 
the more its imagination will be exercised and the more it will 
liave. 

America has no occasion to fear Germany's specialization in 
physical force. The only world in which a Germany like this 
could hope to amount to anything is a world that began to go 
by a hundred years ago. 

Except for the influences that momentarily gain the upper 
hand in a time of war in a nation, Germany herself would be 
saying for herself these things about specializing in physical 
force which I am saying for her. 



LOOK II 

THE COURAGE TO UNDERSTAND 

IF I wanted to protect this country, the first thing I would 
do would be to divide people off. The people who wish to 
defend their ideals of the beautiful the true and the good 
by killing, I would put in one group and the people whose ideas 
amount to enough and whose ideals have the grit, iron and 
blood in them to defend themselves by being expressed, I would 
put in another. 

I would move out the present people living in St. Louis and 
Kansas City and all the central cities of the country and see to 
it at onc^ that the nation put the fighters, all the weak excited 
kind of people that make nations want to hit them, in the great 
safe middle of the nation so that other nations would see plainly 
and once for all that America had put these people where they 
could not be hit and could not hit. The peaceful, sane, safe 
people — the people who are artists, who can express themselves 
and their ideals to other nations, who know how to say and how 
to do things — I would have distributed like forts, all along the 
coast on the east, a great, safe, guaranteed shore of reasonable- 
ness up and down the country from Maine to Florida, a coastline 
of good sense and quietness the mere look of which would keej) 
ugly nations from being ugly. The bare thought of the coast of 
America all studded with people like this— millions of people 
everybody knows, like this — would unruffle a world. It would 
unruffle the nations like a great genial evening light, like a smil- 
ing sunset, and softly, daily unravel their armies and navies 
toward us. Soon every nation would be looking over to America 
defended by its coastline of common sense, by its dreadnoughts 

653 



654 WE 

of quietness and self-possession, by its submarines of reaching 
under and understanding, by its aeroplanes of reaching over 
and seeing past, and by its huge Understanding Army, and say : 
"Why cannot we also defend ourselves like this?" 

This is my America as I see it — slow to anger, declining to 
be put off as an enemy, doggedly understanding, doggedly re- 
turning to the attack of understanding, plenteous-minded and 
with big plains of good nature . . . not needing to be full 
of fine shadings, or needing to be fidgety about our honour, be- 
cause we have such an unconscionable reserve of it. With self- 
possession enough to look like cowards, with courage enough to 
be called cowards, we are too proud to be always having to be 
particular about our pride or how our pride looks at the moment 
or on the dot as duellists think they have to. This might be 
taken advantage of at first, and possibly it would have a kind of 
stupid look for the moment from the point of view of close 
spiritually-calculating, spiritually-economical countries Hke some 
of those in Europe, but in its roominess and hope it is a 
new trait in human nature. A whole new continent fresh from 
God has taken hold of us, has wrought itself into the freedom 
of our limbs and thoughts. We feel daily this new fresh con- 
tinent we have been moved over to; and its mighty streams, 
its green prairies and blue skies and high mountains, long dis- 
tances and big seas, silently, subconsciously, and in our mothers' 
wombs have breathed themselves into us. 

We are here on this planet to assert this quality in human na- 
ture until all nations shall know it shall believe in it and shall 
deal with us in a way that belongs with what we are, and with 
what solemnly before our God, and before all our brothers in all 
nations, we have promised to be. 



LOOK III 

THE WILL TO BE UNDERSTOOD 

I 
THE REAL COLONEL ROOSi:VELT 

GERMANY has given up (for the time being) expressing 
herself. For a great industrial nation like Germany, 
militarism is a defeat. We have seen Germanj^ giving 
up her real self and putting on a special false-front and frightful 
self that the Kaiser and others have thought would be more 
impressive than her real self expressed in her own way could 
hope to be. 

Colonel Roosevelt like the Kaiser has given up on expressing 
himself. As we see him going about calling people cowards and 
liars, traitors for disagreeing with him, praising armies and navies 
and attacking people who disagree with him and making himself 
glaring and terrible to everybody instead of making himself 
plain, the typical average American is too proud of his T. R. and 
of a kind of secret fearful joy he has in him to admit to anyone 
that the Colonel is really expressing himself. We discount 
everything he is saying a little just now. We feel he is putting 
on one of his outside selves, though, of course, he puts it on with 
such energy, jams it down over his real self so hard, many people 
think it is his. But there is another Theodore Roosevelt 
underneath and he knows it or at least Mrs. Roosevelt knows it. 
And his dog knows it. And the rest of us know that this real 
jammed-under self would work as much better with his enemies 
if he would express it as it does with (if we may be permitted) 

655 



656 WE 

Mrs. Roosevelt. As a means of getting things between nations, 
courting is more practical than fighting. By courting, of course, 
one means the masterful agreeableness which makes opposition 
have many difficulties. 

This is our natural American way, when we are left to our- 
selves, of dealing with people. It has come to be to many of 
our critics a national failing, the blind clumsy importunate 
way in which we keep on courting people who would rather fight 
us. 

But in the long run and on the whole though they will have 
moments of not liking it, they are going to like it. And the best 
and finest compliment (as well as the most forcible and becoming 
one) we can pay other nations is to be ourselves with them. 
The main trait in us which makes us ourselves is that we are 
gathered from all nations, feel identified and like to make our- 
selves look identified with all races and with all peoples. The 
gusto the other nations have shown to us in breaking away to 
be identified with us, we have toward them. 

We have a way in our fresh country of breaking loose, of swing- 
ing out, of being our real selves in our relations. No one is 
really going to stop us or going to warp us very long into a feeble 
funny imitation of Europe's way. 

America has a style. 

A nation if it is to express itself successfully to other nations 
cannot do it without a style. 

The first mark of style in a man is his appetite for being him- 
self. 

This is true even of a baby. 

Any man can get the first secret of style by watching his 
first baby at its mother's breast. 

All we have to do to have a style in expressing what we are — • 
in advertising America to protect America — is to express this 
gusto, this gusto of being ourselves, of irrepressible good-will 
toward all, and we will everywhere be understood and will not 
have to fight. 



THE REAL COLONEL ROOSEVELT 657 

Self-preservation in the last analysis turns on a gusto for being 
preserved. 

In other words, our self-preservation is to be self-expression. 

We will find a way to advertise our street-car full of x\mericans 
around the world. 

An egregious appetite for understanding and for being under- 
stood is what we really have in America. We will not give up. 
It is hke life itself to us to understand those who differ with us 
and have them understand us. The will to be understood is as 
imperious, as unyielding and as masterful a passion when it 
once gets its way with men as the passion of life itself. America 
is a nation with an obstinate, sublimely wilful, unquenchable 
goodheartedness . 

In so far as Colonel Roosevelt personally falls short in having 
this American national will to be understood, he makes himself 
unsuitable to represent and incompetent to defend what is the 
most characteristic, most imperious and insatiable desire in 
American life. 

Why does he not insist on being himself, on being an attention- 
engineer, a master of men and statesman, and not foozling out 
into a soldier? 

A people with an original temperament like ours, practical 
and idealistic in the same breath, cannot be represented by a 
soldier. 



n 

THE COLONEL AND THE WORM 

The main practical fault I have to find with Colonel Roosevelt 
in his program of national defense is that he is too meek, that 
he is not aggressive enough, that he has allowed himself to fall 
back into an inactive, sluggish-minded and conventional course 
of action. 

When he is confronted with an aggression it is a soldier's 
nature to think tumty-tum and to act rub-a-dub-dub. 

The Colonel stops being a statesman and automatically raises 
his fist. 

For an American and for a public man with our American 
national tradition this is meek. 

Of course if we are really a nation of second-hand people, if we 
all have second-hand or warmed-over ideas of expressing our- 
selves and defending ourselves, I am in favour of being meek 
and falling back into the regular old-fashioned, melodramatic, 
expected army and navy air, as much as Colonel Roosevelt is. 

I may be wrong in thinking the American people are not a 
second-rate people and I certainly agree that the kind of defense 
America is to have, if second-rate men are going to run it, should 
be the kind that second-rate men can most naturally understand 
and use. I am not making a stand for policies and programs 
aside from persons. 

I may be meek yet. 

I am not unconditionally against armament for self-defense. 

But I am going to wait long enough to get at the facts and in 
the meantime I stand out for the principle that the size of our 
army and navy should be based on taking a census of the number 

658 



THE COLONEL AND THE WORM 659 

of scared people the nation has, a Hst of the names of the mechan- 
ical-minded men in it who automatically raise their fists when 
injured and insulted. 

There are millions of men, American men, who never raise 
their fists when insulted. Others do. Is America just a warmed- 
over Europe, or is it not? 

The Colonel does not think as highly of himself and of America 
as he ought to think. He is content to let us act like a second- 
hand or warmed-over nation. 

He does not take it for granted that we have it in us to insist 
on being ourselves. 

There is a httle story I cannot help wishing Colonel Roosevelt 
would read just now. I only came on the facts in the story the 
other day, and I have thought that if I could put the story down 
here and leave it lying about carelessly in the middle of this 
book, the Colonel might come upon it and it might do him good 
— as it has me. 

This is what I heard (as nearly as I can tell it) : 

LESSONS FROM THE LIFE AND WORKS 
OF A HEALTHY-MINDED WORM 

A worm down in New Jersey had its head cut off. 

The rest of the worm pulled itself into shape and without a 
struggle, put on another head. 

No fuss or teasing or praying. The tail was there, and the 
tail wanted a head, and just put a head on. 

It was all in the day's work. 

A little after this (speaking of the same worm) its tail was cut 
off; but the head was there, and the head knew it was there. 
The head wanted a tail, naturally, and just put a tail on. 

All as a matter of course. 

And yet there was a king some three thousand years ago 
(everybody remembers) who, after a spell of being particularly 
wicked, and when he wanted to express just how humble he was, 
called himself a worm ! 



660 WE 

He thought that nobody could help seeing how depressed and 
sorry he was about his sins and how he could not hold up his head 
before God or before anybody if he called himseK a worm ! 

I think this worm would have mixed King David all up. 

A little while after, this same worm one day (very likely a little 
thing like this would not make any difference to a calm, level- 
headed worm) had its tail cut off and its head cut off, both at the 
same time. But the middle of the worm was there, and the 
middle knew it was there, and the middle wanted a head and a 
tail, and the tail that was going to be there wanted a head, and 
the head that was going to be there wanted a tail. So the mid- 
dle set to work quietly, as if nothing had happened, and put a 
head on one end and a tail on the other. 

This worm, as it seems to me, was a typical American — patient, 
steady, not downed by anything, indefatigable, optimistic — and, 
what all poets and statesmen especially need to be — optimistic 
to the point. 

The question that interests me is how to get Colonel Roosevelt 
to believe in himself and stand up for himself and be an x\merican 
through thick and thin, like this genial worm. 



At breakfast the lady across the table told me about still 
another worm, one she had been reading about in a new scientific 
book. 

This species of worm, it seems, gets its living standing on its 
tail and holding on hard to the bottom of a stream, while waving 
around up at the other end and grabbing for its living. 

(This also is American.) 

One day this worm had its head and its tail both cut off by a 
Great Scholar. The Great Scholar, being very curious about 
the worm and indeed about all wormanity in general, thought he 
would try and see how much this vaunted faith in themselves 
that worms had amounted to. 

So, when he put the worm back on the rock to get a new tail 



THE COLONEL AND THE WORM 661 

and a new head on itself, he tried to mix it up. He put the head- 
end down on the rock where only a tail would be of any use, and 
he put the tail-end up at the top where only a head could really 
be said to work. 

Then the professor watched. The worm stood in the bottom 
of the stream hanging on to the rock by its head, and to all 
appearances waving around much as before (except that the 
professor knew, whether the worm did or not, where its head and 
its tail were and were not) . 

I would have hesitated to say to Colonel Roosevelt, and just 
by myself, what this worm did, but the Great Scholar swears to 
it. 

The worm calmly put a head on where its tail was expecting 
to be, and a tail where its head was expecting to be ! 

(I do not believe that David, in casting about that day so 
long ago for someone mean enough to compare himself to, 
would have thought of putting it off on this worm.) 

Now the question is : What was it about the worm that made 
it possible for it to keep on being itself whatever any mere thing 
that could merely be made to happen to it from the outside 
might be? 

My idea is that the worm was hungry. It did not stop to 
consider whether its stomach would really work with a head on 
the end where the tail had a right to be. It had no theories. 
It was merely so hungry and so full of gusto and of the grit 
to live, that it did not propose to be cheated out of a perfectly 
good stomach that it could have the use of by simply making it 
work backward. And when the worm saw that its whole ali- 
mentary tract was aimed wrong and that suddenly without any 
warning it had got to learn to eat backward — that in fact it had 
got to turn its whole insides around to live — it buckled to and 
turned them! 

I do not know how other people feel about it, but as for me, I 
feel this genial little worm rebuking Colonel Roosevelt. 

He had, all in his own little sturdy insides, the great spiritual 



662 WE 

secret of this country. This worm did not go around to the 
Salvation Army or ask anybody to do anything, or call in every- 
body to see what state of unpreparedness he was in, and say, 
" Look at my poor upsidedown stomach ! " Just as a minute ago 
in this last sentence when my fountain-pen gave out (I'm writing 
on a train) I grabbed a stub pencil right in the middle of the word 
alimentary and went on, so in this same way, as eager to eat and 
not to let go a dinner as I was not to let go an idea, the worm 
grimly scrooged its stomach right around and proceeded to keep 
right on being its true self! And he did a tremendous thing 
like this incidentally and as a matter of course and like taking 
up a pencil! 



Perhaps the reason that Colonel Roosevelt gives up so easily 
and tamely on the art of being himself and expressing himself 
and on the science of being understood is that he has a very 
faint, vague, proper and rather polite appetite for being under- 
stood, and a devouring hunger and unmanageable passion for 
making people do as he wants them to whether he can make 
them understand him or not. 

It remains to be seen whether the Colonel when he settles 
down is going to be permanently like this. In the meantime, 
it seems as if the way for this nation to defend itself would be to 
put itself in the hands of the type of man who has as eager an 
appetite for making a nation understand as Colonel Roosevelt 
has for making other nations get out of its way whether it is 
understood or not. 



in 

THE COLONEL, THE CHINA]VL\N, AND THE 
WOMEN'S CLUBS 

One day a man in China who wanted very much to attract the 
attention of the Emperor cut off his right forefinger and sent it 
to him. 

I dare say it would seem at first to some people a very simple 
and irrelevant idea — the idea that by cutting off his right fore- 
finger and sending it on ahead the Emperor would, of course, 
want to see the rest of him — but after all there is a certain 
pointed honesty in it, a self -revelation of courage and good faith, 
and he was not attracting attention (as many salesmen, reform- 
ers, and advertising men try to do) by demanding a self-sacrifice 
of the man he was trying to reach instead of making a self-sacri- 
fice himself. 

If Colonel Roosevelt believed in advertising and getting at- 
tention as much as this Chinaman did, the country would soon 
be safe. 

Or if the Colonel would even catch up to the standard of the 
Women's Clubs in America and believe in attention as being the 
tap root of events as much as they do, it would be something. 

The Women's Peace Party (I am writing the day after 
Thanksgiving) spent yesterday ten thousand dollars in a few 
minutes on swamping the White House with telegrams from the 
women's clubs of America, Thanksgiving morning, to get the 
President's attention to Peace. 

The ten thousand dollars was spent by the Women's Peace 
Party in telegraphing the women in the clubs to spend ten thou- 
sand dollars more. 

663 



664 WE 

Of course it is easy enough for a large prosperous crowd of 
women in a club, say four hundred of them, to spend twenty- 
five cents (between them) in assailing the President through the 
Western Union Telegraph Company, and the only real sacrifice 
demanded of anybody in this wild grab at the President's atten- 
tion was the sacrifice demanded of the President that he would 
spend his Thanksgiving Day in reading seven bushels of twenty- 
thousand-dollar telegrams. 

The spirit of the women may have been right, but their tech- 
nique was not thought out. 

Technique is always apt to be overlooked at first. People 
realize how important getting attention is, but they are not all 
psychologists and do not realize that getting attention is a great 
art and calls for masters and experts. 

Not everybody should think he should be allowed to bang 
^way at getting attention. 

The way a man's attention is got is nine tenths of the battle. 

The way a man's attention is got is a self -revelation of the man 
who is getting it and goes far to determine how much any idea 
he would have would probably be worth. 

At the same time, while the clutch of the women at the Presi- 
dent's attention falls short in technique, it enforces all the more 
— the very desperateness of it, the main point of this book. It 
reveals the overpowering instinct, the essential insight of the 
women of this country that no matter how wildly they got it, 
even if they got attention by a method that instantly threw the 
attention they got away, attention must be got. 

If Colonel Roosevelt could catch up to the three hundred 
thousand women of the women's clubs of America in seeing this, 
it would soon cease to be one of the great national threatening 
expenses of this country to install and have ready year in and 
year out and year after year, huge armies and navies to keep 
Colonel Roosevelt feeling safe. 



IV 
THE COLONEL AND THE BUSINESS MEN 

Colonel Roosevelt is not altogether unfamiliar with the way 
the Chinaman felt when he cut off his finger and sent it to the 
Emperor to get his attention, and when the women the other day 
tried to get President Wilson to notice them Colonel Roosevelt 
knew the wild, desperate, hopeful feeling they had while doing 
it, as well as anyone. 

The Colonel has tried getting President Wilson to notice him, 
too. 

The trouble with the Colonel as an expert in attracting atten- 
tion is that while he understands how people feel who try to do 
it, who wish they could do it, he does not always understand 
how people feel who do do it. The feeling that successful 
business men all over this country have about advertising 
and that all advertising men have about it, is a little beyond the 
Colonel. 

The plain fact seems to be that while Colonel Roosevelt has a 
kind of courage and a kind of strength, he cannot be called ex- 
actly a spiritually robust man. 

I might define what I mean in this particular connection by 
a "spiritually robust man." 

The main thing in an advertisement that makes it arrest and 
hold attention is its courage. The thing that grips first and that 
lasts longest in a good advertisement is the extraordinary way 
it has of believing itself, and of believing itself first before it asks 
anybody else to believe it— the beautiful, shrewd and rather 
literal faith it has in what it is doing and in what advertising 
can do. 

665 



666 WE 

This is a fact about a good advertisement, or rather about the 
man who writes one, that any reader can verify for himself, if 
instead of thinking merely what the advertising man says, he will 
think about the way he is acting about what he says. 

I might put it to the reader personally. If you are an adver- 
tising man and take a page in the Saturday Evening Post and de- 
liberately risk three thousand dollars in another man's pocket 
upon three hundred words you pick out for him and upon mak- 
ing those three hundred words the particular ones that make 
people believe you, you believe in advertising. If you expect to 
have to make people believe the words fifty thousand dollars* 
worth, or if you expect to keep with those three hundred words 
five thousand men in ten factories for ten weeks busy making 
the things the words sell, you believe in advertising. In the 
calling you have chosen you are what might be called a spiritu- 
ally robust man. 

This is a thing which is being done every day. 

The substructure of an advertising man's faith is: 

First: "I have a good thing and believe it.'* 

Second: "Good people can be convinced that it is a good 
thmg." 

Third: "I think I can convince them." 

Fourth : " If I cannot and do not convince them I give up my 
position." 

Very few preachers when they do not succeed in advertising 
what they advertise expect to give up their positions, and most 
advertising men do. 

I am more hopeful for the moment about advertising men 
than I am about preachers as a class to-day in America, because 
as a class they are more spiritually robust about their profession. 
Most advertising men act as if they believed in persuasion more 
than most preachers do. It is a regular accepted orthodox thing 
for a preacher not to believe in persuasion except in a kind of 
gentle vague way. Even the business men in his parish who pay 
him for it, do not expect him to believe in persuasion in the way 



THE COLONEL AND THE BUSINESS MEN 667 

these same business men all the rest of the week when they go 
dow^n to their stores expect their advertising men to believe in it. 
If the advertising men and the salesmen of these same business 
men fail in getting attention in what they are expected to, they 
discharge them. 

Of course I am not saying that I am in favour of their dis- 
charging their preachers. 

I am merely wondering and I cannot help feeling a little hurt 
that people do not take preachers more seriously. I feel hurt in 
the same way about statesmen and about people who are getting 
attention to peace and about many of us who would have to be 
called possibly, in a polite way, virtue mongers. 

Why do business men who go about believing in the spirit and 
in the power of the spirit and in the power of attracting attention 
all the week, stop believing it on Sunday in church or stop be- 
lieving it at the polls? Why should anybody really think that 
there is something about the spirit and about being spiritually 
robust which adapts it to grim practical use in business but that 
somehow being spiritually robust is not practical enough for 
religion or would be too rough for politics? 

If ordinary men and business men would have the same grim 
faith in us, in preachers and statesmen, that they have in adver- 
tising men, if they would hold us to the same stern standard of 
faith in what we are doing, to which they are daily holding up 
their advertising men, one cannot help wondering if the kingdom 
of God after all would not almost come in a few years and if the 
country could not be saved in a few weeks. 

The moment we find goodness in people being believed in as 
hard and being advertised with the same dogged literal faith 
to-day as goodness in shoes, dress goods, pianolas and vacuum 
cleaners, churches will be crowded to the doors. 

In the meantime as long as we think our preachers are and 
have got to be almost professional failures in their profession, 
as long as we expect them not to succeed in getting attention as 
a matter of course, we must expect to take the consequences. 



668 WE 

Advertising men have attained as yet in their new beginning 
profession only a small per cent, of the things we are going to 
expect of them, and they are reeking with faults that anyone 
can see, but the way they believe in themselves and believe in 
their new profession is one of the inspiring spectacles of the day. 
The fact that the moment advertising men fail as attention - 
engineers they expect to be dismissed by their clients shows the 
spiritual power and simplicity, the literalness, of the faith that 
they and American business men have in the spirit — in the still, 
terrible power of touching men's minds. 

I have seen in the Ladies'' Home Joi/r/iaZ thousands of grim 
courageous dollars being spent every year in telling people news. 
I have seen hundreds of factory chimneys, vast hordes in the 
street of workmen flocking to their work, and hundreds of thou- 
sands of dollars a day all being wagered and all being put up on 
the value of this news. All one has to do is to look and a great 
spiritual faith in news about teeth and news about skin and liair 
and news about hats and clothes can be seen any day in the back 
pages of any number of the Ladies'' Home Journal. Only a few 
thousand dollars against all these hundreds of thousands of dol- 
lars can be seen being spent there in telling us news about our 
actual selves, about furniture that we would find convenient 
for our minds, inventions that would make our hearts happy and 
help us to be loved and to love the world. 

We go to church and the news we are told there about our 
souls costs, say, in the average church, fifty dollars or seventy- 
five dollars a Sunday, building and steeple and all. 

These are facts with which we are all familiar and there is no 
need to mention them except for their revolutionary bearing 
on the present crisis of our nation and on the fate of the world. 
The only reason that peace and the other virtues are not practi- 
cal is that they are not advertised. We compel people to listen 
to soaps and pianolas. People come to us afterward and thank 
us and bring their money to us for compelling them to listen to 
soaps and pianolas. We spend millions of dollars a day on pay- 



THE COLONEL AND THE BUSINESS MEN 669 

ing people for having attracted our attention to news about our 
purses. 

The next thing we are going to do is spend miUions of dollars 
a day on getting people to come to us afterward and bring their 
money to us afterward and thank us for having compelled them 
to listen to what we have to say about peace. 

Telling nations about peace has never even been tried. It 
makes the heart leap to think of it. It is absurd for Colonel 
Roosevelt or for anyone to give up on getting people to want 
peace when peace has never really been advertised. 

If America will put up as big an appropriation on express- 
ing its idea about peace as it does on expressing with an 
army and navy its fear of Germany and of Japan, we will be 
defended. 

The other day Colonel Roosevelt said of Mr. Wilson: "There 
are many things that are the matter with President Wilson, but 
the worst is that when he has said something, he thinks he has 
done it." 

That is just it. He has. So have many people. 

Think what Colonel Roosevelt has just done by just saying 
this one sentence. 

Every corporation that has covered five continents with goods 
that it has got people to notice by picking out words, every big 
business firm which is paying dividends out of words it has 
got attention with, that has grown rich out of words for things it 
has got people to believe, and grown powerful out of words for 
making people spend their fortunes and spend and sacrifice their 
lives and give themselves, sees that Colonel Roosevelt is a super- 
ficial observer of what really counts in modern life. 

By one fell swoop of one little remark he has convinced five 
hundred thousand business men who have salesmen on the 
road, who believe in advertising, who have won their business 
and keep their business by using words and by paying for words 
that get people's attention to it — that Colonel Roosevelt is 
a superficial and onesided man in his idea of what it really is 



670 WE 

that constitutes power and turns things over and gets things 
done in modern hfe. 

Saying a thing that makes people do a thing is more powerful 
than doing it. Saying a thing or getting attention to a thing to 
be done is the highest, surest most perfect and most highly con- 
centrated and most powerful form of doing it. 

Anybody can make anybody believe he can do a thing after 
he has done it. Pure power comes in picking out the word or 
action, the one tenth of one per cent, of really doing a thing, 
which will make all the world join in and do it, which will make 
all the world believe that it can be and that it shall be done. 



ON GETTING THE COLONEL NOT TO BE AFRAID 

When Colonel Roosevelt goes softly booming through this 
book page after page and lands at last on what I was saying a 
page or so ago about Judge Gary and Mr. Frick, and about select- 
ing the fittest man or the fittest nation by fighting, he is going to 
read it as if he had written it himself. He believes it is true as 
much as any American. If he believes it is true, why is it he 
does not immediately proceed to act as if it were true, instead of 
slumping meekly back into doing and doing harder the selfsame 
precise thing that the people who do not believe in it do? It 
is curious that Colonel Roosevelt at the greatest crisis of his own 
career and the nation's career should suddenly fail in self-asser- 
tion, should come apparently to a kind of precipice in himself, 
drop off sheer from his own identity and act like anyone else. 

Of course, every man has bare spots in his mind — places in 
which he allows his thinking to be done for him by machinery 
or by other people. It is a personal disappointment to me that 
at just this time Colonel Roosevelt of all others, the man who 
owes his entire career to advertising, to an easy familiar way 
he has of slapping the world on the back and to a kind of grit 
he has of taking the world in hand personally and making things 
happen to it, the man who, if he has not been the best, has at 
least been the most colossal advertising man of his time, the 
man who has done nearly all the best things he has done by ad- 
vertising and who has done some of the best of them even by 
advertising himself, should suddenly turn his back on his own 
profession. In the most stupendous, original and arresting 
opportunity to make all nations look any nation has ever had 

671 



672 WE 

Colonel Roosevelt throws all advertising to the winds, drops all 
attention-engineering with a thud, gives up, lies down, blubbers 
for big ships and soldiers, and talks about fighting and about 
being terrible as hard as anybody does. The same big, monoto- 
nous, feeble, unnoticeable fog-horn of ugliness, the same stupid 
meaningless mooing of guns, the self-same deafening thunder to 
get attention that all the nations have failed with before our eyes. 
Colonel Roosevelt wants us to adopt to make America attract 
attention, to make America stand out, to make America stop 
war, in the world. 

I cannot help wishing Colonel Roosevelt would study what 
a quiet modest faith in advertising can do, would take a look 
for a moment at what John D. Rockefeller did with so little 
effort and with such simple means — just a pair of overalls and 
a simple little plain dollar-and-a-half table — to stop war in 
Colorado. 



VI 

THE COLONEL'S WAY AND MR. ROCKEFELLER'S 
WAY OF NOT BEING AFRAID 

I have said that the first thing in order for the country to do 
to defend itself is going to be to get Mr. Roosevelt to believe in 
advertising and dramatizing as much as Mr. Rockefeller does. 

As the Colonel stands in front of a good many people, I am 
wishing he would step out one side a minute and give me a chance 
to have a word with them. I have thought that the matter 
might be put to Colonel Roosevelt in this way. If Colonel 
Roosevelt wanted to control a man next to him who was looking 
through an opera glass and getting violent because he was seeing 
something that was not there, there would be several courses he 
could take. He could grab the man with both hands, fold him- 
self bodily around him, carry him out of the house by main 
force (his idea of what to do with Germany), or he could argue 
yearningly with the man and try to tease him to look harder at 
what was not there until he saw that it was not there, or he could 
take a third course: he could reach his hand over to the man's 
glasses, turn the screw, or show him how to turn the screw a 
little to the right or a little to the left, sweep the blur from his 
eyes away by moving a sixteenth of an inch, focus his vision on 
the place where he had been seeing what was not there until 
he plainly saw what was. 

If the rest of us could not get Colonel Roosevelt to believe in 
advertising, perhaps Mr. Rockefeller could. Mr. Rockefeller 
when he found himself with twenty thousand miners regarding 
him with fixed and glassy eyes, and with an insane but not alto- 
gether unprovoked illusion about him and about his company, 



674 WE 

tried main force at first, and Mr. Rockefeller was as afraid not 
to use or to threaten to use main force at first as Mr. Roosevelt 
is afraid not to to-day. Mr. Rockefeller let his Company under- 
take, as all the world knows, a pitched battle with the miners. 
The Company said practically it would have nothing to do with 
the miners. It would not speak to them. It would scarcely 
speak to the public. 

But in due time, after Mr. Rockefeller and his Company had 
tried fighting the miners for doing precisely what they them- 
selves would have done if they had thought they were seeing 
what the miners thought they were seeing, it came over Mr. 
Rockefeller that possibly if he could get the miners in spite of 
his faults and his money to pay a few minutes attention to him 
as a possible fellow human being, it would be practical and 
helpful. His not being a fellow human being was the main 
difficulty and was uppermost in the minds of the miners. Why 
not go out and meet the difficulty face to face and prove that 
just possibly he was? 

Mr. Rockefeller forthwith fell to considering what would 
focus the miner's vision and get him to take a serious honest 
look at him as he was. If he dared to face them as a man, he 
thought, if he dared to let them take one good frank manly look 
at him, he might possibly slide up into a position to be a com- 
petent president of a great company and be a kind of man who 
was believed when he said things. What word or action was 
there that would turn the screw of their attention? They had 
been fighting because they would not look and every resistance 
the Company offered made them make up their minds harder 
that they would not look. Mr. Rockefeller would only, of course, 
have to make a very slight fleck of a move if he could think of the 
one which would make the men want to look. 

He chose overalls and a little speech at a table. The screw of 
their attention was turned and their eyes were focussed on what 
was there. And what was there instead of making them prefer 
fighting made them prefer looking and working. It was all a 



THE COLONEL AND MR. ROCKEFELLER 675 

matter of a little skill in picking out the word or action that 
would turn the screw of their attention . There was no main force 
about it. If there had been any main force about it, he could 
not have turned the screw. All the main force on earth could 
not have turned the screw or could not have made the miners 
look at John D. Rockefeller as a fellow human being a minute. 

What Mr. Rockefeller did in wiping out and dramatizing 
away his enemies, in stopping almost a national war between 
capital and labour by a very slight sincere bit of advertising, and 
self-confession, by a dramatic, honest, manly move of identity 
and frankness, good-will and natural human feeling, is but a 
hint of what America could do to prevent war between nations 
and not need to own a great army and navy. 

It might cost more and require the multiplication of the same 
simple process more times to focus a nation than to focus a few 
thousand miners, but the cost of skill, of expert knowledge in 
human nature, and of the direct use of human and revealing 
genius would cost one half of one per cent, of what the main force 
Colonel Roosevelt would use would cost. 

A million dollars' worth of turning a finger, of delicate focus- 
sing, of voluntary skilful turning of people's eyes, would do as 
much to defend a nation from attack as five hundred million 
dollars' worth of main force and of moving around people's bod- 
ies and looking as if one were going to fight. 

Modern national self-defense consists in touching the imagi- 
nation of the people. It consists in taking one spectre, blur, 
superstition and delusion after another, turning the screw of at- 
tention on it until people softly, easily, and as a matter of course 
stare war out of countenance. 

The first practical, pointed thing for a nation to undertake to 
do is to get itself trusted by another nation so that it will be al- 
lowed to stand close enough to it to turn the screw. 

After this it becomes a mutual affair. Illusions and desires 
to fight, when two nations both get to work together on it, are 
stripped away in flashes. 



676 WE 

The first thing for America to do to defend itself from Ger- 
many is to do something that will make Germany let us get 
close enough to it to turn the screw and let Germany get close 
enough to us to turn ours. There are certain definite illusions 
we have about Germany and certain definite illusions Germany 
has about us. We will put them in rows and assail them with 
our eyes one by one, focus on them and remove them. 

There is no reason why America should take a servile, imi- 
tative, self-abnegating course, turn itself violently in a few 
months into another kind of nation and into defending itself in 
another kind of way — a way that is instinctively repugnant to 
it — ^because Germany insists or momentarily looks as if she in- 
sisted on having nations change each other's minds about each 
other by main force. 

I cannot expect in a few words to deal adequately with the 
illusions that come between Germany and America at a time like 
this, but I can suggest in part the possible lines or directions 
of dramatic action which we could follow in taking these illu- 
sions, dealing with them lightly and skilfully, with turning screws 
instead of with crashes of main force, with big, old-fashioned, 
clumsy swoops and threats of ships and soldiers. 



LOOK IV 

FEAR-SURGERY 

AFTER the country has got Mr. Roosevelt to notice Mr. 
Rockefeller and how he makes advertising work, perhaps 
the next best thing for the country to do will be to be 
specific and direct with the Colonel, pick out some one specific 
fear that Colonel Roosevelt daily has himself and advertise it 
out of him. When the Colonel has actually seen with his own 
eyes a daily fear of his own being bodily removed by advertising, 
he will begin to believe perhaps in what can be done to adver- 
tise away the fears and illusions and causes of war in other 
people. 

If America, instead of spending on Colonel Roosevelt's fear 
of Germany the two or three hundred million dollars he is hoping 
to get us to spend on it, would spend say one hundred million 
dollars in collecting and placing before Colonel Roosevelt the 
facts about the powers and about the intentions of the German 
people which would keep him from being afraid of Germany, 
and if x\merica would then proceed to spend another hundred 
million dollars among the Germans which would remove illusions 
and keep the Germans from being afraid of Colonel Roosevelt 
and afraid of us, Colonel Roosevelt's fever of preparedness would 
soon most gracefully and even gratefully subside. Colonel 
Roosevelt would be as ready for an advertising and dramatizing 
program as anyone. He is not a bad advertising man in his 
way when he believes in it or when he sits down and thinks a 
minute what he wants to advertise, nor is he a bad dramatist 
when he has decided on his idea to dramatize. 



677 



678 WE 

There are certain specific illusions to be dramatized and ad- 
vertised away. 

Our first illusion which lies at the bottom of our American 
panic of preparedness is that Germany will try to do in America 
what she has done with Belgium. 

Our second illusion is that we have not the brains to express 
ourselves to Germany. 

Our third is that Germany has not the brains to understand 
us if we do. 

Our fourth is the illusion that a hip-pocket peace, the kind of 
peace they were trying in Europe which brought on the war, 
will make America look impressive. 

When one thinks of it, nearly all of these illusions which have 
been used as reasons to crowd people into humdrum prepared- 
ness can be shown to be reasons against it. 

I would like to deal in the next chapter with the Belgium 
illusion. 



LOOK V 

A FEW OPERATIONS 
I 
THE BELGIUM FEAR AND OTHERS 

I DO not deny that in this chapter in my book I am letting 
a small fraction of my readers elbow themselves in and 
crowd in front of the others. 
In trying to write a manual on peace, on the eternal and the 
recurrent principle of peace, of mutual attention, of real power 
in human relations, I more than regret that the majority of my 
readers, those who have not taken the step of being born yet, are 
going to be obliged to bother in the next few pages with the 
illusions Americans are having to-day about Germans and with 
the illusions Germans are having to-day about Americans. 

To make all these fresh innocent people after fifty or a hun- 
dred years come way back and plod painfully on with us through 
our little parenthesis or tunnel of insanity we are all in together 
to-day, is as painful a task to me as it would be to any man, but 
of course if I am really engaged in making things happen in the 
tunnel, if I am really seeing in my way the little hole of light at 
the end of it, and if in this book, reader and author and all, we 
are really working toward the little hole of light, perhaps it will 
not be uninteresting after all to those dim flocks of people reach- 
ing up in tiers along the years ahead who are going to have 
illusions of their own, and who are going to have to blunder and 
try in making things happen themselves, to observe how we are 
blundering away to-day in making things happen to us. 

679 



680 WE 

They will wonder about Colonel Roosevelt the most, I think. 
He will seem so visionary and sentimental and simple-minded 
and unnoticing in keeping right on fifteen years over the 
boundary line of the twentieth century, with wireless tele- 
phones and aeroplanes hovering all about, still believing that 
the attention of a great nation in modern times can really be got 
by main force. 

As Colonel Roosevelt is going to seem so picturesque and so 
quaint a figure to the majority of my readers (in fifty or a hun- 
dred years) , I am going to hope they will not mind my holding 
them up once more in this book with him. 

It is better to deal with somebody in particular who is being 
afraid at a particular time. The fundamental principles of deal- 
ing with men who are afraid and who have let themselves be 
driven to their wits' end and to the use of main force, are the 
same in all generations. 

But to go on to IVIr. Roosevelt's Belgium fear. 

If it were not for the fate of Belgium hanging over our minds, 
our American panic of preparedness would cease in a day. 

But a great many of our people seem to me to be taking their 
feelings about Belgium and turning them right around sharply 
and using them backward. Everything they feel ought to make 
them act precisely the other way. 

Germany's treatment of Belgium, instead of being a special 
reason for having a big armament to protect ourselves from 
Germany, is a reason against it. 

The idea that there is a special peculiar brand of human na- 
ture in Germany that we will have to defend ourselves from, on 
account of Belgium, is a momentary idea. 

Any other nation that had let itself get helpless in the hands 
of narrow military experts might have got caught before it saw 
the truth too late, in a trap of invading Belgium, as Germany 
did. 

But one Belgium is enough. For America to swerve out of its 
whole national policy and arm itself to the teeth to express its 



THE BELGIUM FEAR AND OTHERS 681 

fear of Germany on account of Belgium is a monstrous mis judg- 
ment of what German human nature is hke. The Germans 
have been passing hke all the nations through a kind of crazed 
crisis, but they are not an underwitted people, and every day 
the war keeps on and every day the nations keep piling up against 
them, they are thinking that one Belgium is enough. 

The astounding loneliness and hostility that have been precipi- 
tated upon Germany out of a whole world by the one act of in- 
vading Belgium, the loss of prestige with neutrals, the loss of the 
right of way of the Germans in their own consciences, and the 
loss of the right of way of German culture in the minds of all 
fairminded men, which German culture would certainly other- 
wise have had — these are not being overlooked in Germany. For 
a great nation like America to take alarm at Belgium, hurry pite- 
ously into a big army and navy — for a nation like America to 
turn turtle with dismay, start up a new and revolutionary 
national defense on the one colossal thing in history that is all 
arranged for now and that will never dare to happen again, is 
the height of panic and short-mindedness. 

Instead of spending two hundred and fifty million dollars in 
being afraid of Germany and in getting ready to threaten to 
shoot, we will spend it on fear-surgery, on removing to the last 
remotest chance, any occasion we may have to'fear Germany; we 
will spend it on advertising and dramatizing, on revealing point 
by point our items of disagreement with her, and on throwing 
over all we do the vast web of our boundless mutual interests, of 
the things Germany wants of us and things we want of Germany 
which will settle the peace of the world. There is no reason why 
we should have a great army to face a world with merely because 
we are afraid of one nation and afraid of one nation's making 
the same mistake all over again in the next few years that she is 
nearly annihilated with now. 

What Germany learns of her common interest with us, she 
will learn by inference of her common interests with all the other 
nations, and by definite local action upon Germany America 



682 WE 

will insure the peace of the world. Of course, the same prin- 
ciple applies to Japan for people who have the same fear of 
Japan. 

If we can deal with Germany in this way, we will not only 
defend ourselves from Germany, but defend all the other na- 
tions from Germany, and Germany from all other nations. 

The second illusion about America and Germany which we 
will proceed to advertise away will be the superstition that we 
cannot express ourselves to Germany. This would have been 
true before the war. Nobody noticed us before the war, but 
now that we are made against our wills into an umpire nation 
of a war of the world, and now that the war has made one peep 
from America count as much in Europe to-day as her whole 
three hundred years has counted before — everything is changed. 
There never will have been in all history (when the time is ripe) 
such an amazing opportunity for a nation to express itself and 
to arrest and hold the attention of Germany as America's in the 
next few years. 

The third illusion America will proceed to advertise away is 
the idea that Germany cannot understand us. The idea is re- 
moved by the fact that Germany has never tried to understand 
us and it has never been necessary to Germany until to-day that 
she should. But the moment when, out of breath with the war, 
she tries to pull her business with us together again, understand- 
ing us and being understood by us will be the one thing that 
Germany wants most. She will outdo us in trying to under- 
stand and in being understood. Her banks, steamships 
and factories will fold themselves about us to understand 
us. 

Our fourth illusion which tempts us to humdrum preparedness 
and which we will proceed to advertise away is our fond idea 
that being prepared to shoot does not mean that we will really 
have to shoot. The idea that we are going to be very urbane and 
sweet and coo at Germany year after year with our hands on our 
hip pockets, will be hopelessly removed by advertising the fact 



THE BELGIUM FEAR AND OTHERS 683 

that this poUcy, with a nation Hke Germany, will not work. 
Germany of all nations, the nation that has tried to befuddle 
other nations with the best and biggest hip-pocket peace the 
world has ever known, is not going to be deceived by little mod- 
est raw imitations of shrapnel and sweetness, by a young mi- 
worldly amateur nation like ours across a sea three thousand 
miles away. 

The more we coo with our hands on our hip pockets, the less 
Germany will believe in us and the less she believes in us, the 
more she will arm against us. 

We will announce to Germany that we will spend a hundred 
million dollars in Germany alone on specific localized treatment 
and removal of the causes that make Germans hate and fear us. 
We will spend another hundred million dollars on specific local- 
ized treatment and removal in America of our American fears of 
Germany. As it would save Germany from having a stupen- 
dous navy bill just for us, Germany might gladly join in and add 
a hundred million dollars more to be spent on removing our 
fear of Germany. 

If we spend two hundred million dollars in keepmg ahead of 
Germany in war preparedness, Germany will spend more to 
keep ahead of us, and we will both spend more ^nd more every 
year and so on forever. If we spend two hundred million dollars 
on removing the fear which is the cause of war preparedness, 
there will be less fear every year and less money would have to 
be spent every year in both nations on being afraid and on scared 
people. 

In each nation the days of its military neurasthenics, of its 
epaulet invalids and of its Httle panic of shooting-sickness would 
soon be over. 

An army and navy appropriation means an ascending ratio of 
expense. An advertising appropriation means an automatic 
descending ratio of expense. 

The way to oppose people is to contradict them and the way 
to contradict them is not only to say what is opposite to what 



684 WE 

they are saying, but to say it in so opposite a way from the way 
they expected we would say it that they will listen. 

From the point of view of psychology, to say nothing of his- 
tory warm and bleeding all about us, hip-pocket peace is not the 
way just now for America to arrest and hold the attention of the 
world. 

My argument is grounded in psychology and in the specific 
nature of advertising. In an artificial situation the first law 
of arresting attention is to pick out the most inevitable, the most 
obvious, natural, simple thing to say and to do and then say it 
and do it with the most colossal unexpectedness. 

The first secret of making, getting and holding attention is 
the courage to be one's self. 

This is as true of a nation of ninety million men as it is of 
one man. 



II 

STILL OTHERS 

When some new thing happens and I begin to say some dis- 
agreeable — that is, of course, some essentially scared thing 
about the Germans and about this German human nature we 
all keep guessing on, and that we are all being censored out of, 
way over there under its lonely private Baltic Sea, I find myself 
thinking of the Germans vaguely and in the third person. A 
little later when the little touch of humanness and of ordinary 
reasonableness I have in me after all about people, begins setting 
in, I find myself falling into a tone of direct personal expostula- 
tion and saying You to Germans about the things I am told 
they are doing. I stake off carefully in my mind the Prussian 
military staff and let them remain carefully in the third person 
and say You to the German people. I have made up my 
mind to take an attitude toward them which they and I both, 
when we are over the fear and secrecy and panic of suspicion 
that go with war, will be glad. 

Here is one of my sample illusions and a sample of the way 
this thinking in three dimensions, in three persons, and finally 
working around to the First Person Plural, comes out. 

"With joyful pride we look upon this latest exploit of our 
navy," the Cologne Volkszeitung says in speaking of the Lusi- 
tania. 

I had the usual natural feelings on reading over these words 
about the Germans and their rejoicing over the Limtania. 

How do I know that they rejoiced even now! If when the 
Volkszeitung published this statement all that they had heard 
was the sinking of the ship, and if they did not know twelve 

6«.5 



686 WE 

hundred non-combatants went down with her (as Americans we 
did not at first) , and if when they did know they were appalled 
by it, I would forgive them. And if they knew I did not know 
that they did not know, when I wrote these words above, they 
would forgive me. 

Well, for my part, except for driving in and getting Germany 
not to do it again, I think I ought to take the words back, or 
hold them in suspense. They may be one more illustration of 
how it works to believe and act on anything one hears until 
afterward and until the thing is ripe. It is only making all over 
again the mistake England made about Germany and that 
Germany made about England, that the moment they heard, 
they judged with guns. 

It is the cause of the whole war — judging with guns, arguing 
and thinking things out with dreadnoughts and opening up 
subjects with shrapnel. 

Anyone can see how much easier it is for me to take back 
these words I have just written or to let them wait than it is for 
Germany to give back to England five hundred thousand dead 
men with apologies and compliments. 



Here is another sample illusion I have tried to work through in 
three persons. 

When I first heard what we know of Germany's spy system, 
and realized that she had been peering about for years in other 
countries among the busy unconscious innocent modern- 
minded peoples, going daily about their affairs, my whole atti- 
tude toward our modern world and toward human nature swerved 
ab®ut in a week. The little innocent island of Monhegan where 
r was writing was reeking with rumours of German spies. I 
almost half believed them. I found everywhere I went all this 
big innocent busy world about me agog with a new and sudden 
fear. 

Is the world the kind of world the German General Staff has 



STILL OTHERS 687 

conceived it to be? Is the German General Staff right in elabo- 
rately preparing to deal with human nature by a huge spy system 
throughout the world, or is it not? 

Then I came slowly to a position of saying We with Ger- 
many and of having America say We with Germany on mucli 
the same principle that, when my hand was nearly frozen last 
winter, I packed snow around it. I find myself arguing like 
this : 

It is this treacherous disbelief in human nature, this incon- 
ceivable fear and suspicion of people in other nations, and this 
organized panic in Germany about all human nature in the world 
except her own, which has brought on the war. The best way 
to meet this superbly organized fear of human nature with whicli 
Germany with her elaborate spy system has confronted the 
world, is to have one great nation by some one great simple 
action assert its faith in it. 

The United States is this nation. The shortest cut the United 
States can take to express the most faith anybody could think 
of in human nature, and put it where it would count the most 
would be for the United States to express its faith in Germany. 
To believe to-day in the nation that has not believed in anybody, 
that has acted deliberately for forty years, and with elaborate 
and superb precision upon a theory of fearing to be attacked by 
all of us — the nation that has the most incredible organization 
of fear and suspicion the world has ever dreamed of, that has 
drilled its children, its little boys and girls in fear, and made 
all its little world an army in disguise — this is the nation America 
must face with trust. There is no other way to disarm Germany 
but to trust the German people, to look them in the eyes and 
assert to them and assert to their leaders in their behalf that 
they have been misled by their leaders, that their leaders have 
had the most amazing efficiency in handling the most amazingly 
inefficient assumption about modern life. 

We will ask the leaders of Germany to trust us and we will 
trust them to correct their unspeakable mistake and take our 



688 WE 

word for the trustworthiness of the rest of the world and begin 
the relations of both nations again on a new basis. 

It is as impossible for a nation like Germany to have great 
relations to the world and be a great nation on a basis of distrust 
as it is to conduct a business world without credit. 

All there is to business is credit or mutual trust and it is all 
there is to nationality or to internationality. Germany can 
have it proved to her, by a nation beginning with an act of trust, 
that she is in the wrong about self-defense. 



Here is another illusion I want to work through in three 
persons. Germany says to us (at least Colonel Roosevelt's 
Germany, as he interprets her), practically says to us: 

"We have immense properties and interests in America and 
some ten million Germans we have lent to you besides, and it 
seems to us that in a huge indiscriminate country like yours, 
gathered as the poor raw thing has had to be from so many 
countries besides Germany, you cannot hope in the nature of 
things to run your country as it ought to be run in the interest 
of the world. The huge, sprawling, slovenly cities, for instance, 
you Americans have provided for us Germans to house our in- 
vestments in, and the reckless offhand experimental way, crowd- 
ing in around these industries of ours, you run your legislatures 
and your laws of finance and trade — all these things show at 
a glance that, as compared with us, you are notoriously unfit to 
control the rich set-off portion of the globe that you have taken 
up. You are not fit to run it economically and efficiently and for 
the best interests of the globe as we Germans would. And every- 
body knows that Germans are more fit and efficient, thrifty and 
economical in getting things done than other nations. Germany 
can gain a yard with three soldiers where England to gain a 
yard has to sacrifice ten. Germany can supply five men for 
national defense for exactly the same sum America has to pay to 
get one, and everything about Germany, as everybody knows, is 



STILL OTHERS 689 

practically more or less like this, from our aniline dyes to our 
universities, shells, submarines, national statuary, bombs, 
Zeppelins, painting, music, poisonous gases, poetry and Goethe 
and Kant and Krupp — and as England has taken hold of India 
to govern the country better for the world, it seems to us it is 
our duty to take hold of America with its lynchings, with its 
huge, incapable, slouchy strikes, pull it together trimly, make it 
a fit place for our ten million Germans who cannot be here and 
who have to live in America, to live and multiply. 

"You people in America" — this is what Germany seems to 
Colonel Roosevelt to be saying — "do not see, or seem to see, 
what we Germans could do for you, and how fit we are to take 
care of you, and we are coming over with our army and nav;y^ 
almost any time in a few weeks now to prove to you by main 
force how fit we are. ..." 

If this is an illusion Germany has about herself, we can com- 
bine with her to advertise it away in Germany. 

If it is an illusion we have in America about Germany, we can 
combine with Germany to advertise it away in America. 



EPILOGUE 
SUPER-PREPAREDNESS 



1 

The Right to More Than One Nation 

IN THE world in which men's daily thoughts actually live, 
an empire is a back-county idea. Governments and 
governmental-minded men from sheer inertia may putter 
with empires. But human beings — real men and women and 
countless business men — live in their thoughts all the time all 
day every day in this world as a whole. They look nightly at 
this same great blue common of the sky, whirled around at them, 
out of space and time; the wireless whispers round it and the 
cable ticks under it. They reach round the earth every morning 
with a paper. In their subconscious, deeper and realer life 
every day they use a whole world to live with. They get up to a 
whole world in the morning and go to bed feeling it around them 
all night. They are daily conducting their business, their art 
and even their religion, as a world enterprise, and they are used 
to it and to look up as they have had to lately and see their 
governments still toddling along and still twiddling faithfully 
and conventionally away on boundary lines which all men to-day 
except men with small nation-sized governmental minds have 
given up thinking of or noticing even in prose, even in their 
daily business, to say nothing of their art and their religion — it 
is as if we had been asleep since we were born. The people of the 
earth to-day look at their governments and rub their eyes. 
There is hardly a man anywhere when he sees what his govern- 
ment is trying to do with him lately and with other people, who 
can really believe his eyes. 

To be jerked back and jammed down all in a day under our 
OYm governments, to be violently ripped away from this big 

ms 



694 WE 

whole world in which we have daily lived, done business, prayed 
and sung and travelled and worshipped, and to find ourselves 
suddenly all in a day packed up and thrown back separately, 
all in a rush, into little separate hordes of men, all violently 
thinking with guns and shells of themselves — it is beyond belief. 

Our governments are very violent with one another. But 
nothing that all these small-sized gunny-headed poky little 
governmental-minded men with their guns, with their flags, 
with their howls of glory, with their typhoid fever epaulets and 
murder, can do or make their nations do to other nations, is to be 
compared to the violence that has been done to every individual 
man in this world, every citizen of this great happy busy up- 
roarious globe, this vast public street of nations that every man 
has been living on for fifty years, in stopping him full tilt, in 
jerking him off suddenly and without a word into the little 
side-street of his own nation, in shutting him up and shutting all 
his people up in the hall-bedroom of their own interests, of their 
own concerns, and slamming the great iron door of the whole 
world — all the wind and freedom and sunshine on it — in his face ! 

The sudden littleness and meanness that has been forced upon 
us, upon every man of us, who can measure it or measure the 
sick-mindedness, the kind of fever of just thinking of himself 
and of his own little silly slit of this planet as if it were or ever 
could be again, after where he has been living all these years, 
fought for like a whole world or as if the fate of a whole world 
swung on it? 

All this experience we are all having to-day is merely a 
demonstration to us of the extraordinary outfit for peace 
with which the world has been already practically fitted up 
before the war began — in the individual hearts of men every- 
where. Almost any man anywhere on this globe to-day of the 
larger sort has a bigger heart, is using daily a larger working 
conception of the world than he sees his own government has. 
He has read his newspapers and done his business with this con- 
ception for fifty years, he eats with it, sleeps, bargains, hopes. 



EPILOGUE 695 

fears, curses, sings and prays with it. He is born with it, and 
dies with it on his Hps. 

Even his Uttlest acts are world-reaches. He reaches softly, 
easily, with his fingers around the girth of the planet. He lifts a 
world between his thumb and forefinger even when he eats. 

"I often think of it — of how a man lives to-day in a whole 
planet. Machines are like the tides that do not stop. They 
are a part of the vast antennae of the earth. They have grown 
themselves upon it. Like wind and vapour and dust, they are a 
part of the furnishing of the earth. If I am cold and seek furs, 
Alaska is as near as the next snowdrift. Everywhere is five 
cents away. I take tea in Pekin with a spoon from Australia 
and a saucer from Dresden. With the handle of my knife from 
India and the blade from Sheffield, I eat meat from Kansas. 
Thousands of miles bring me spoonfuls. The taste in my 
mouth, five or six continents have made for me. The isles of the 
sea are on the tip of my tongue. . . . Crowds wait on me in 
silence. I tip nations with a nickel. . . ." 



Last night a man's voice in Washington, 3,000 miles across 
guns and censors, talked quietly with Paris, with Honolulu lis- 
tening 8,700 miles away. 

A nation fighting for itself to-day is out of date. The first 
item in a nation's self-defense to-day is gomg to be to defend the 
planet it is on. 

A nation that proposes to stave a hole in the hull of its planet 
and drown itself and all the rest of us, if it cannot have its own 
way, cannot but expect to be stopped. But there is not a nation 
aboard the star that we can cramp ourselves in America into 
wanting an armament to defend ourselves against. The one 
thing we want an armament for, is for a planet, to hurl it at any 
nation that by straining or fighting for itself should stave a hole 
in it. 

A very little hole in this planet concerns us all. 



696 WE 

Any leak in this world is an international leak. There can be 
no such thing as a private leak on this planet. It is everybody's 
world. 

Super-Preparedness 

America presents a pitiful and pusillanimous spectacle to the 
world to-day, if, in a supreme moment when all the other nations 
are fighting to protect one another and fighting for the liberty 
of the world, she sits in Congress and putters and broods over her 
own self-defense. 

Self-defense for a nation like America can only be a by-product 
of her defense of a world. 

Everything else in this nation is for all the world. Why 
should we have an army and na\^ merely for ourselves? 

While I believe that armies and navies for self-defense are un- 
practical, clumsy, archaic, that they are organically ignorant of 
modern life and modern human nature, and that they are an 
unbelieving, unad venturous, inherently half-witted institution, 
I am in favour of having our people have them if they have not 
yet arrived at the courage not to have them, but I would be 
ashamed. 

If we must raise a big army and navy, I am in favour of 
at least raising it for noble motives and using it solely for great 
and noble ends. 

In this present moment of the colossal self-sacrifice of nations, 
of the unstinted spilling of the blood of all peoples for some 
cause outside themselves and larger than themselves, I would 
not be so much ashamed of an army of conquest for the United 
States as I would of an army of self-defense. 

It would be an immoral army, but it would not be weak and 
mean. It would not and could not be taken as an expression of 
the vast, smug nonentity of a great people holding itself apart 
from the spiritual struggles of other peoples, thinking of itself 



EPILOGUE 697 

and defending itself and living by itself in a kind of safe, narrow, 
contented moral back alley of the world. 

If what our proposed preparedness is for is to mark America 
off from the main highway of the progress of the world, and from 
all the struggling on it, and from all the risks and hardships and 
adventures of the souls of the nations, if our increased armament 
is intended to set us serenely up at last as the first great Safety 
First nation of the world, if it is merely intended to give us in- 
creased facilities for being meaner, for being more provincial, 
more haughtily provincial than we have ever been before, I am 
set against preparedness. 

The more adequately and elaborately a nation that is like this 
and that seeks to prepare itself like this can be kept from being 
prepared, the sooner it is exposed, stripped naked before all the 
peoples and before all history, the sooner it is swept off the face 
of the earth by nations that are alive enough to have some fight 
in them and some soul in them, something still left in them that 
they will die for, the sooner my cup will be filled with gladness 
for the world. 

I have believed that America would rather die than to give up 
being a nation that has something bigger than itself it would die 
for. I have believed that it is true that in our American pro- 
gram of preparedness the last thing we really want to do is to 
think that the American people merely want to keep out of the 
great common human problems of Europe. The problems of 
other nations are our problems. We long daily in America to 
break in with love, hope and faith to the struggles of other 
peoples. Every morning we rise from sleep, read our papers 
and go to our work longing to see some way to put our faiths 
with their faiths, our sacrifices with their sacrifices. We feel 
this beyond our power to express it in any way except in action. 
We are gathering our slow colossal millions together to act. 
We are determined to find a way to express our people to all 
the peoples of all nations. More and more every day, every 
week, as the war goes on we feel the need of being close to 



(»)8 



WK 



I Ik'iii ;im4| of riM-Iiii^ lli.il I licy •*«'"<* reeling llijil, lli<\y .uc <1<)S<' lo iis. 
'I\)wn,nl IIm' UirrH of nil men in .ill ii;i lions, however iuislak<'ii or 
<lr<'(*iv<'(l Mm'.v "iJiy l><\ vv<' I urn our inccs. Dnily vvc ^Jillicr 
nhoiil llicm in spiril, in sorrow Jind hope, <'rying, "We wjuil 
you :iii(l you vvjiiiI us." D.iily, nij^lilly, we cry jicross Ijic sea, lo 
Ihcni, lo all of llicni (Dear l>r<>lli<rs! Dear rcllow-hluildcTcr.s!) 

WI': WAN!" VOIl AND VOII UANI' US. 



AiMi'iwK'A Stands \\y 

Hill if vv<' waiil <'v<'ryl)o<ly and il" it is a, pari of our nalional 
i'ailli lo hrlicvi* I lull we vva,iil cvcryhody and lo hclicvj' llial, 
rvcrylMxIy waiils us, wlial is lln'rc llia,l we can <lo and do now 
and i'or llic ncxl lew years lo express lliis I'ailli ol" ours lo oilier 
iialions, lo f?el aJI lliese oIIhm- li^lilin^* na,li<Mis lo sel us one sidir 
iorever as a, peaceriil people, l>cliev«' in us once for all and respecl 
and IriiHl wlial we say and <lo? 

The l)esl shorl-cul lo heiiij; Ix'lii'ved in a,nd lrusl<'d hy all IIk^ 
li^hlin^" nalions Ihai America, ca,ii luke lo-da,y would be lo lak<; 
an aclion which no iialion l)eli<'ves we have llie eounifjje lo la,ke. 

1 have in mind iiw ;icl ion I lial would he a shorl-eul lo I riisl lik(^ 
(his. 

I$ul as I he coura4;<' in the a.cllon I have in min<l is whal Ihc 
aclion would he lor, and as Ihc coura<;(* in il is Ihe only Ihin^ 
which will make il w()rk, I do nol say (as I wish 1 <'ould) Ihal I 
am ill I'avour of il yel. 

I will say al'liM- I his hook has IVoiih-d Ihe |)eo|)le. 

1 waul a look or a, whisper IVom AiiKMica, lirsl. 

I do nol a,dvoeale America's havinj^ a look of eoiiraj^e when 
Ihe coui;i^<* is nol lliere, nor can I a.dvocale America's f^oiiif^ 
llirou<;h IIk' molions of a fi;rim, sliipendous a,cl of courage (like 
seir-disarmanienl for inslance) while all Ihe while sJie is reeling 
meek and frail inside. 



i:iMi.(K;rK (m 

Hill, I l)<-li<'V(' llial. flic inorc fjuickly jirid iJ(irnisUikaf>Iy W(; ^ol 
r<*a(iy in Ahicncn unci u.wwowwco. we nrc. }r<:l\.i\\^ ready for iia- 
liorinl (lisjirrnarrK^nt., \.\io. mon; quickly wc Jirrari^'c; iril.(;lli^'ont war 
slll>.slil,lJl,(^s and pul, llic^rn onl, hcforc I.Ik; world in an inU^lligcnt, 
order, st.'uid oiil. Ix-jorc ;dl llic nations and willi oru; .sw(;('i), with 
one Ini^c n.ilional ^'csturc with the \)\^ hand of a conlirK'nl hurl 
our jirniy ;i,nd n;i,vy one side ;uid sjiy lo I he luilions: "See tliis 
tiling- I hill w(; liave done! We h;i,v(; thrown our old foolish 
eliihhsh phiyth injurs away! You will not d;ire to say w<; are 
afraid of you. \V(; are not afraid of you. We prove it. We 
have thrown our arms at your feet!" tjie more cjuiekly America 
will lie in ;i, position to he helieved in enou|^h to tak<; the lead in 
or^anizin^i, IIk- \>(';\.(<' of the world. 

'^I'he d;iy is ;i,t lumd when, in s[)ite of yielding to iriereasorl 
arirnimerd now, w<; will ;iet p(';«,e(; instead of talkiii}^ ;i,})Out it. 
Kv<'ry ujition li;i,s t;j,lked ;d)Out [xtaee for fifty years. It is talk 
u})OUt [)e;i,ee llnit luis hrou^ht, on the wjir. W(! will with one? 
aet hurl one peae(;ful nation upon ;i. world. If we are not ready 
to do this to-d;iy, w(* will ^ct re;i.dy to do it to-morrow. We vs ill 
jinnounee tlia,t w<; arc; ^oin/4 to launeh a disnrrruimerd, [)ro;^r;i/n 
the first, momerd, we e;i,n /i;et our new wjiy of defendin;^ ourselves 
rejidy. The ofdy tiling tluit will (tlineh [x^aec; and make nations 
l)eliev(r us in wliitt we say ;d)out pearte, is Helf-disarmamenl . The 
(li.sarrmimerd. of this nation when it er)mes will he the most 
simph; eolr)Ssal sin^h; (;onelusiv(; short, almost monosyllahie, 
way a,ny na,tion has (ivc.r (;x[)ressed its faith in itself and its faith 
in other na-tions since the world Ixtgan. It will be a shout of 
peace, a Injge tlirce di(3crs for p(;aee that will riji^^ around tJie 
world. 

I Jim ordy in favour of a, l>a,cked-up disarmament. IVohahly 
urdil w(; a,r<; ready with our suhstitutcs and ean prove we are 
])n'pa,red lo express ourselves to other nations, we will liave to 
he pr<'i>ar<^(l to fi^ht them. VVc; are alr<;ady ^'cttin^ ready to 
express ourselv<^s. We arc already seeing that we have stu- 
pendous and formidahle waAS of making' ourselves nnd<-rslood 



700 AVE 

and of advertising and dramatizing and asserting ourselves that 
will undermine all the armies of the earth. 

In the meantime, in place of the frank, conclusive, national 
disarmament with which I believe that very soon America is 
going to assail the nations and win the trust of a world, what 
practical temporary program am I ready to suggest? 



I am not hopelessly at variance with the militarists except 
for a minute. 

The moment the militarists will stop scurrying about like 
ants in an ant-hill, running every which way and throwing up 
their hands and calling wildly for armament for self-defense, 
and will make their stand instead for an armament for world- 
defense, I am with them. I will work for the things they want, 
for the airships, submarines and lyddite, as much as anyone 
would, but a mere effeminate, safety-first armament, a scared, 
anxious, national safety -first movement does not interest me, 
does not seem to me to be worthy of our great, new, fresh-born 
nation on this other side of the sea. America has a free original 
western idea of what a great nation is for and of what a great 
nation wants, of how a great nation wants to live outside 
itself, wants to spread out and flame up its living, its time 
and its money, its love and its hope and desire over all the 
earth. 

I believe in a prompt generous and unqualified present to the 
other nations from the United States of an armament for the 
defense of the world. If the other nations will not combine to 
accept such a present from America, will not organize and get 
together to use it, add to it, contribute to it, if they are not yet 
ready to arrange to run it and help control it, the next thing for 
America to do is to organize an advertising campaign among 
the people of all nations which, item by item, reason by reason, 
shall make them ready, shall make them understand us and be- 
lieve and trust us, and accept as a sacred trust an army and a 



EPILOGUE 701 

navy that will fight to defend a world, from a nation that will 
not fight to defend itself. 

America will make her motto : 

Not a Dollar for Self-defense 
Millions to Defend a World 

An armament to be built and handed over by America as a 
present, a kind of World Policeman Present, to defend all nations 
would be gladly looked forward to and gladly paid for by all of 
us. This planet we are on all together, this ship in the sky, 
means more to us in America if it founders than we mean to 
ourselves. America's first attention to itself is to attend to the 
safety of the planet. Any nation that has hysterics or that 
scuttles it, any nation that starts a mutiny or panic in its crew, 
is the personal enemy of every American. 

The little pittance of four hundred millions a year we now 
spend in America in making a present to ourselves of an army 
and a navy we never use, and never believe we intend to use to 
defend ourselves, we would be willing to double or treble for an 
army and navy that the whole of a star could be having the use 
of every day, protecting the star from panic in the passengers 
and mutiny in the crew. 

It will be to America a confession of faith, a national world- 
religion, not to have an army or navy to fight for itself, or to 
defend itself. But any nation on this planet that fights for 
itself instead of the planet, or that fights to defend itself instead 
of to defend the planet, America will fight. 

4 
Eleven Nations Say You and I 

There are various reasons why this program of combined 
self-disarmament and world-defense presents itself to me as 
America's special opportunity to bring peace to the world. 



702 WE 

First. To abolish our individual army and navy for our own 
use and give it away to the world is the best, shortest and most 
arresting and convincing way for America to persuade other 
nations to abolish their own individual armies and navies for 
their own use and present them to the world. 

Second. To heap up preparedness against other nations be- 
cause they have heaped up preparedness against us is superficial. 
Instead of having all the nations agree to smother themselvea 
with their own armies, to commit suicide because they are 
afraid to die, it would be less superficial for us all to get together 
and agree with one another that as a permit for living ourselves 
we will let each other live. I am in favour of having America 
take a stand for preparedness-with, but not for preparedness- 
against. 

Third. Preparedness-against is not practical. 

There is nothing to interfere with the families of the town of 
Northampton if they want to, proceeding to make arrangements 
to-morrow morning, each of them, for preparedness against each 
other. Mr. Witherell next door, and the Geres across the road and 
I can mount guns over our front doors and put up stone forts 
around our yards and make every arrangement A. Wise Wood 
could suggest for preparedness against each other. But if the 
Misses Gere had two guns over their door, I would have to have 
three. And so on forever. And so the Misses Gere and Mr. 
Witherell and I have all agreed that preparedness against each 
other is not as practical as preparedness with each other, and we 
have combined on a police station downtown. 

This may not look as noble as the other way, and it may seem 
rather severely sensible, but our feeling at the end of High Street 
is that the world is soon coming to it. 

All that is going to be necessary to bring it about is to have 
one nation out of us all stop being humdrum a minute and stop 
doing what everybody does, make a start, hand over its army 
and navy to the world. Then probably having given a sign of 
good faith by not defending itself, the nations will leave it alone 



EPILOGUE 703 

enough and believe in it enough to let it go freely about the 
world organizing preparedness-together instead of preparedness- 
against in all nations. iVmerica will step into the breach and 
be the nation to give away her army and navy first. Having 
done the thing herself, she could then consistently take up a 
collection around the world of armies and navies, put them to- 
gether and have them placed in the best stations to defend 
everybody. 

Fourth. Preparedness-against as a policy for America is a 
program which leaves too many Americans out. Only hum- 
drum fighters or soldiers can really work up any interest in pre- 
paredness-against. 

An entirely different set of people, an enormous body of prac- 
tical, far-sighted men — men with an entirely different set of 
motives and powers and gifts — can all be gathered in and got 
together in defending a world, when only the third-rate men 
and men with a third-rate philosophy, with a third-rate 
technique, could really get interested in defending a single 
nation. 

It is not practical to defend the country with this kind of 
people. The seven thousand officers the President wants cannot 
be got in this country among people who are merely interested 
in this country. In a big intimate modern world like this 
people who are merely interested in this country could not defend 
it from the world very long. They would soon be outwitted by 
people who knew the world more than they did. 

The greater and more powerful gifts all go with the larger 
motives and the wider sweep of vision. The moment the mili- 
tarists in America present or will let other people present a 
program of preparedness-with instead of preparedness-against, 
a program full of We-vision and We-motivqg and We-gifts 
worthy of a great people and a great country, the whole country 
will be with them. As it is, the militarists are going to have to 
fight for every inch they gain in this country as long as they keep 
on proposing to it solemnly to coop itself up into defending itself. 



704 WE 

Fifth. There is another practical reason why it has seemed to 
me that adopting the larger preparedness — a preparedness-with 
instead of a preparedness-against, or a kind of neurasthenia of 
self-defense — is America's most practical course. 

Every man who has talked about a really adequate army and 
navy for America and who is trying to wake up the country to 
preparedness-against has talked about conscription. The men 
who talk about preparedness-with will not talk about conscription. 

To be practical or to get the kind of army and navy that we 
want we must touch the highest and deepest enthusiasms of our 
people. 

If we announce that we are preparing an army and navy to 
hand over to a world, and if we appeal to the deepest, best and 
most universal instincts of our American men, for our army, 
people will all but fight each other to get into it. 

It is already difficult in America to hire any man at any price 
to tuck himself away in an army or take the army life seriously 
as a man's life. 

To be in the world army will be to be in a great world metrop- 
olis of picked men. 

5 

The Death of Murder 

I have not wished to make a wholesale or ungracious charge 
against the people who have been conducting the campaign for 
world-peace and who have stood out before everybody all these 
years as belonging to Mr. Carnegie's little flock, who have at- 
tached themselves in their wistful way to his big blind building, 
and done what they could. 

But we are standing in a great crisis of the world, with four 
thousand years looking back on what we do to-day, and almost 
with four thousand years standing by and waiting to see what 
we do, waiting to see what we may load up on them, which they 
will have to unload, and it does seem an opportune time to point 



EPILOGUE 705 

out plainly once for all the real damage the people who have 
stood for peace in America have done all over the world (not 
as individuals of course — there are plenty of exceptions) by the 
prevailing tone in which they have spoken of peace, in which 
they have weakly niggled and teased the world with peace. 

The strategic moment for America as a great peaceful nation 
to act is at hand. 

The world after this war is no longer going to pay any atten- 
tion to a nation that takes a negative or a wistful weak tone in 
getting other nations to notice peace. Nations that the world 
cannot get to notice peace and believe in peace are going to be 
arrested, isolated and surrounded by our World Police and put 
in the planet lockup to think. 

It is through the organization, equipment, advertisement and 
national financing of a huge project to persuade the nations to 
accept this gift and join in making it effective that America is at 
last to take her place in the destinies of the world. 

No live useful nation to-day wants to stop or bother with 
defending itself. It is the world's business to defend a nation. 
Only a world can do it, either safely or well. Only a world is in a 
position to defend a nation from other nations, easily and with- 
out interruption. 

I do not propose to go up and down Broadway with a revol- 
ver to defend myself. If New York cannot do it with electric 
lights and signals, why go to New York? Why go up and 
down Broadway at all? What would there be in a New York 
like that that would be worth going to see? What could New 
York think of for me that I would want if it had not done 
thinking enough yet to remove from a man who came to it 
the bother, the disgrace and the personal cowardice of carrying 
a revolver? 

It is as silly, as inconvenient for a nation to carry a revolver 

as it is for a man to. 

The shrillest militarist and the gentlest, softest old ladies of 
peace that we have, would all be willing to unite alike and work 



706 WE 

hard alike for the largest army and navy anyone has demanded 
yet if it were to be a gift to the planet, to all the nations together 
to use for all of us. 

Most nations already believe this. But America is the only 
nation that is in a position to act on what it believes. Instead 
of being impertinent for America to lead and take first action, 
it will be impertinent if she does not. The way for us to lead 
is not to tell other nations what we believe but to do what we 
believe ourselves. The quickest and most conclusive way to do 
what we believe and to make it catching is for America to organ- 
ize and hold ready and present to the nations double our share 
of land and sea police. 

Behind this bulwark of a World Police we will then arrange 
more slowly our two other world defenses which are the main 
permanent stand-by defenses which I have written this book 
to propose — a campaign of peace at home and a campaign of 
self-expression abroad. 



As rapidly as these more permanent peace arrangements are 
organized and perfected (peace at home and self-expression 
abroad) so that World Police will be less necessary, the World 
Police will be reduced. 

The police force will naturally have to be big at first, but the 
moment we can once get the entire world fitted up with street 
lights, with mutual self-expression, with an outfit for having 
everything and everybody protected by being in a blaze of light, 
the world will do what every city has already done by fitting 
up its banks, doors and back alleys with electric lights — it will 
cut down its police force by half. 

If all the nations said they did not want it, did not want to 
club together to accept from us, to carry on and keep up with 
us the huge single world-lighting system for all nations — the one 
big stick for all nations — we would all be in favour of spending 
the present four millions out of five hundred millions a year our 



EPILOGUE 707 

Government is now spending on its army and navy, on getting 
them to want it. 

An army and na^^ merely for America would be wasted. All 
self-defense armies are wasted. They merely make other na- 
tions have one to match it. Every army and na\^^ a nation has 
to defend itself not only throws away itself, but it throws away 
the army and navy of all the other nations. 

The spectacle of every civilized nation of the earth going down 
to its own shore and with one single, big, solemn splash of gray 
steel dumping itself into the sea — the spectacle of all the nations 
gravely practically going to hell and living in hell because they 
are afraid the others are going to send them there — is one that 
America can bear no longer. It would be more economical to 
send one to hell, and let the rest stop bullying and begin to live. 

The nation that bullies first, that is too scared not to fight, 
thai believes in its army and navy the most, should be sent as 
near hell as may be necessary to protect the rest of us. We 
would not be doing any great or extra harm in doing this. 

By piling up a huge army and navy to defend itself, such a 
nation is sending itself to hell anyway, and all we would do would 
be hurrying it. 

After we had hurried it, the rest of the world could draw a 
free breath and live. 

I need not dwell on this program longer of America's pre- 
senting to the world a combined national disarmament and 
World Defense. 

With the magnificent but hopeless sacrifices of other nations 
America will take her place with a stupendous, overwhelming, 
hopeful gift to all nations alike of preparedness for peace instead 
of preparedness for war. 

6 

We 

We will lift away this speechless wealth that has been heaped 
up upon us helplessly out of meaninglessness and out of death, 



708 WE 

this wealth that without asking, without expecting, has been 
heaped up upon us by twenty nations until in a kind of vast, 
absentminded, bewildered innocence before the despairs and 
sorrows of a world we stand aghast at our own well-being — we will 
lift up all our shameful sorrowing prosperity, our huge windfall 
of undreamed-of might; we will publicly disown it before all 
peoples, and in the name of all peoples we will cast away our 
right to use it for ourselves. This unholy blood-money that 
has drained and dripped to us from thirty thousand dead 
men a day we will lift up and pour out before all nations as a 
sacrament for the peace of the world. WTiat we did in Belgium 
was lifeboat and rescue work after the ship had gone down — a 
mere helpless picking up of dots of drifting people from the sea. 
What we do now shall be to save the ship. A self -disarmed 
nation that fights for a world shall be our vision, our great ad- 
venture and statesmanship. To take any action less free, less 
bold, less generous and less unanswerable than this will be to 
miss our opportunity. If we do not do something restitutional, 
expiating, something world-hearted like this with this new 
unmentionable, this helpless, speechless wealth dripping from 
our hands, we shall have branded our memory on mankind for a 
thousand years and have made our name a by-word and a hissing 
in the mouths of men. . . . 

If this act of world defense and world championship is to 
mean anything, it is not going to be initiated by the President 
and proposed to a people scurrying about with their hands full 
gathering up gold rolling in the streets. It must be proposed to 
the President by the people themselves. With our hands full of 
the gold from a thousand battlefields we w ill rise up and break 
away, we will gather ourselves together, thunder upon the door 
of the White House with our gold, crowd upon the floor of Con- 
gress and say: "You see this money in our hands? Take it 
back to the people from whom it came ! Spend it for us on the 
peace and the silence of the world!" 

When we do this, with every dollar we return shall America 



EPILOGUE 709 

be trusted and believed and loved and defended and understood. 
There is no middle course for America to take to-day. We 
will be a prayer on the lips of all people or we will be a curse. 

If we do a thing like this, what need will there ever be of our 
having a frail, mean, anxious, little scheme of preparedness for 
defending ourselves? What nation in the world will ever dare 
to attack America if America has proved itself a nation with a 
world in its heart? 

We will make it a definite national slogan : 

Self-defense for America a hy -product of its defense of a world. 

It might be and it might not be by a committee of Congress 
or by a meeting of the Cabinet that a stupendous adventure for 
a great people like this should finally be conceived and initiated. 
Or it might be from the people or a man of the people. But if 
America is to take its stand for a simultaneous combined action 
of not arming itself and presenting an armament to a world, 
however the suggestion starts, it can only come in the deepest 
voice, its most carrying and final voice, as the voice of the will 
of the people; it must come from the spontaneous uprising of the 
people, from newspapers crowding around Washington, from 
books stuttering out the vision and the prayer of men and women, 
from a thousand great cities, from little valleys in the hills, 
from mighty streets lifting up their voices upon Congress, and 
from great factories, throwing their ringing purses on the floor 
of the Treasury for the fate of a world. . . . 

The thing that America did and that everybody knows Amer- 
ica did for Belgium too late, America will now do and do on time 
for a world. The people of America will arise and in the sorrow, 
defeat, and despair, in the great solemn cry of all nations, 
we will stand forth and make a new covenant with the world. 
And the prayers of leaders of the people in all nations, the cries 
of unnumbered women and little children, the ghosts of three 
million dead men flocking from a thousand battlefields shall 
hover about us while we do it. 



710 WE 



GOING TO PRESS 

The problem of just how a nation should address itself con- 
fidentially to itself, how it should arouse itself to its best self, 
while twenty other nations are listening at the door and looking 
more or less coldly on, is a difficult one. 

When I, as an American, have watched England trying to 
express the ideals of England to Englishmen, and France trying 
to express the ideals of France to Frenchmen, and when I have 
watched the German authors and journalists trying to rally 
and express and focus the national soul of Germany with ref- 
erence to the soul of the world, I have noticed that I have had 
to forgive and qualify. 

The other nations are spectators in this book, of America 
trying to find itself and to come to itself. 

I hope they will watch us a little kindly and forgivingly as 
we bungle our way in among them. 

Of course, this book I am writing about ourselves and about 
what eleven nations ask us is one of the bungles. 

But, after all, we must each take our turn and each national 
soul must try — must keep on in the presence of the others look- 
ing at the world's soul and then looking at itself until it can 
find, with other national souls helping, what it is especially 
for and what its relations to the world's soul is. If nations would 
all try and all watch other nations try in the spirit in which chil- 
dren are watched when they are learning to walk, it would 
help. 

I would be very grateful if the other nations looking on at 
a young nation wavering and trying and falling and trying 
and still trying in these pages, steadying itself before God and 
before the world, would be gentle with us and wait hopefully 
for us a little. 

God only knows how under all the smoke and roar and 
strangeness and fear and blackness of their mighty battles 



EPILOGUE 711 

filling the dome of the world, we are daily struggling to have 
this spirit toward them and keep remembering them, believing 
them, trusting them, and expecting from them as in the days 
of the sunny fields and of the peaceful roofs and of the singing 
cathedrals and of the pictures and the songs, and of the happy 
thronging streets we have known them by. 



THE END 



INDEX 



Abbott, Lyman, 318 

Addams, Jane, 291 

Advertisements 

Taking them seriously, 193-196 

Little autobiographies, 200 

In "Mount Tom," 202-207, 210- 

213 
Formula for writing, 212 
And flavour, 313 
The main thing in, 665-666 

Advertising 

Spiritual secret of civilization, 188 

A great profession, 198, 220 

Creed of possibilities, 211-213 

The soul of, 215-217 

And attention bills, 218-219 

Secret of, 288 

Three forms of power, 326 

Self, 332-333 

And ice-bergs, 413 

A weak-sounding word, 452 

As a fine art, 646 

Advertising Men, 192, 197-201, 205, 
217, 220, 221-225, 412-413, 448, 
646, 665-668 

Advertising Peace, 51, 63, 71, 121 

Africa, 489 

Aisne and Marne, 620 

Aladdin's Lamp, 605 

Alaska, 695 

America 

Her confession of faith, 11, 453- 

454, 701 
Keeping peace with Japan, 13 
Must not turn peace around, 17 
And dreadnoughts, 21, 24, 26 
Her national emotion, 28 
And disarmament, 24, 282-286 
And Carnegie, 33-40, 48, 125-126, 

135-140 
Its own peace palace, 53 



Must believe in human nature, 63, 

256-257, 420-421 
And the soul of advertising, 215-217 
Her literature, 235, 240-241 
In a state of revolution, 248 
Getting her own way, 274 
Must have an idea of her own, 302^- 

306 
And force-reverence, 367-369 
"Too proud to fight," 374-376 
A plain business nation, 401-402 
A national motto, 302, 409, 701 
Scared about ourselves, 417, 507-509 
A fireside talk, 450 
Program for, 453 
Advertising Germany, 493-494, 499- 

500, 506 
And the cold gray tone, 531-532 
Must arrange team-work, 558-559 
As a working model of peace, 564 
As cement, 587-588 
Does not have to look simple, 589 
The Red Cross nation, 592 
The altar people, 592, 620 
Mind-reader of nations, 594 
Must decide, 619-620 
Its crowds, 624 
A Newfoundland dog, 626 
Her strongest asset, 626-628 
The We-country, 636-637 
The core of, 639 
Little Brother of the world, 640 
Too proud to fight, 654 
And a coastline of good sense, 653 
Has a style, 656 
Her will to be understood, 657 
A warmed-over Europe, 659 
Her illusions about Germany, 676- 

689 
Umpire nation, 682 
Must trust Germany, 687-688 
And world-defense, 695-696, 700- 

709 



712 



INDEX 



71; 



And self-defense, 695, 696-697 

Has an original idea, 700 

Her battle, 620, 639 

In position to act, 706 

And Belgium, 708, 709 

Her slogan, 708 
American boys 

And force, 367-368 

And German schools, 461 

One who ran away to Germany, 
503-504 
American Business Man, 196, 200, 

214-215, 235, 381, 567 
American goods and the war, 405- 

414 
American National Commission, 575 
An Anonymous Man Despairs, 69 
Annapolis and the people, 30 
Anger, How to control, 446 
Antony, Mark, 187 
Arabic, 587 
Aristophanes, 397 
Armies 

(See "Dreadnoughts." See also 
"Hate-machines.") 
Armoured Millionaires 

Fight with money, 144-146 

Guns and education boards, 146-147 

And the true, the beautiful, and the 
good, 153 

America's "Want Ad," 175 
Army and navy bills, 82, 392, 399 
Artists 

Who feel superior, 133 

Training a boy to be one, 208 

And national defense, 240, 263-265, 
285, 448, 568 

In a machine-age, 332-333 

The doom of war, 355 

World handed over to, 388-390 

Let in what rest of world thinks, 
540 
Asparagus beds and fortunes, 170 
Associated Press, 647 
Attention 

Mr. 'Ford gets his workmen's, 74- 
75, 99-121 

Can we get each other's, 77-78 

And steel cars, 79-83 

And six million board-bills, 84-86 

Nations, capitalists and labour un- 
ions attempt to do without, 87-88 



Not to be got to-day by hand, 90 
Machmes that already have it, 90-91 
Millionaires and show windows. 172 
And the effect of Foundations, 175 
BoucOc White tries to steal some, 

179-180 
Territory of, 180, 220, 222, 407 
And book agents, 182-184 
And interruptors, 184-186 
And department stores, 186 
And trusts, 186 

And Antony to the Romans, 187 
A personal question to-day, 187 
And Jesus of Nazareth, 188-189 
And afternoon tea, 214 
Of the American business man, 214- 

215 
Bills for, 218-219 
Several gears of, 269 
Germany fails to get it, 297 
America's engineering feat in, 419, 

454 
Screwnng it up, 520-521, 673-676 
Chinese way of getting, 663, 665 
First law of arresting, 684 

Australia, 695 

Authors 

And the territorv of attention, 180- 

181 
And ad-authors, 195, 198-201, 233- 
235 

Automobile, its value, 235-236 



B 



Bach. 395 

Balkans, 275 

Baltic Sea, 685 

Banks and railroads, 385, 386 

Barnum, P. T., 325 

Bayonne, New Jersey, 142 

Beelzebub, 631 

Beasts and men, 7, 60, 61 

Beethoven, 395, 397 

Belgium, 271, 297, 298, 403, 494, 495, 

498, 536-537, 549, 573, 590, 678, 

680-681, 708, 709 
Bell, 595 

Belmont, Hotel, 272 
Benevolence 

Such as Carnegie's a menace, 33-40, 

154 



714 



INDEX 



Mr. Ford has an orgy of, 102 

Making it harder, 150-152, 165 
Bernhardi, 62, 257, 261, 262, 331, 403, 

591 
Bibles and war-problems, 13 
Billboards 

And Ford cars, 246-247 

Spiritual, 253 
Birmingham, Ala., 13 
Blind Russell, 133 
Blucher, 259 

Board-bills, six million, 84-86, 260 
Book agents, 182-184 
Book, This 

If Carnegie would sign, 136 

Those who will sign, 138 

Where it comes in, 265-266 

A journal, 617 

And "We" with Mr. Wilson, 645 

Fronting the people, 698 
Books 

About the war, xii-xiv, 57 

A national defense, 260-265, 289, 
402 
Boston, 194 

Boston Symphony Orchestra, 97 
Boston Transcript, 327 
Both sides in a fight, 349-351 
Boys Telegraph Company, 603 
Brandeis, Louis D., 383 
Bread and molasses, 251 
Breakdown of European languages, 

4 
Broadway, 628-629, 633, 705 
Bryan, William Jennings 

Remonstrates, 56 

As a looking-glass, 310-311 

His flavour, 312-313 

Adapted to brass-band things, 323 

National Advertising Heater, 326 

Dropped with a thud, 329-331 

Not naive with himself, 333-335 

A sentimentalist of peace, 334, 356, 
370-372 

If he would look backward, 337 

His hand-to-mouth frankness, 340- 
341 

His lack of technique, 370-372 

A national asset, 371-372 

Doing team-work with Roosevelt, 
373 

His treaties, 377 



A national precaution, 487 

Tries to express America, 538 
Bur bank, Luther, 13, 27, 230, 247, 292 
Business 

Two spirits in, 401-402, 408 

Is business, 441, 566 
Butler, Nicholas Murray, 163 



C^SAR, 443 

Calve, 395 

Campanini, 395 

Cancer and white mice, 142, 158 

Careers, picking them out, 169 

Carnegie, Andrew 

Sets up a playhouse for peace, 10, 
16, 20 

A Mid- Victorian model, 32 

Part of the nation's working vocab- 
ulary, 33 

And tlie colleges, 33-40, 48, 125 

Making him ridiculous, 35, 38 

An experiment station, 37 

If he had made his money out of 
peace, 41, 51 

Does not recognize peace, 41-42 

His wake of millionaires, 45 

His peace telescope, 46-48 

Is not America, 48, 135-136, 139-140 

His tip to the church, 50, 136 

How he might help, 51, 54-55, 63, 
83, 127-130, 569 

And Ford, 121, 451 

His dress-parade tendency, 123-126 

His rubber stamp, 125 

If he would sign this book, 136-137 

And the hardships of being benevo- 
lent, 151 

There is not going to be another, / 
138, 167, 169 

Reading this book aloud to, 138-139 

Trying to lead the beautiful and the 
good, 154 

What we want from him, 156 

Helping us whine, 564 

Orgy of putting up buildings, 569 

And Shaw, 601 

And Miinsterberg, 609 

His flock, 704 
Carnegie Institute, 123-124 
Carrel, Dr., 141-142, 157 



INDEX 



'l.j 



Caruso, 397 

Cassius, 443 

Cathedrals and grenadiers, 540 

Catholic Church, 474-475 

Cemeteries 

And apple orchards, 156-157 
Filling each other's, 279 
Century, The, 212 
Cervantes, 222, 397 
Chandeliers and radiators, 327 
Chautauqua, 259, 320 
Chicago, 311, 379 
Chicago Fair, 193 
Child, common denominator, 594 
Chinese 

Shake hands, 273 
• Superstitions about, 513-515 

Way of getting attention, 663-665 
Christ 

His statement about the meek, 53 
Arrests attention of twelve men, 

188-189 
His cry on the cross, 447-448 
Tells us to love our enemies, 517 
His statement about a child, 594 
Christianity, never been tried, 185 
Christians who feel superior, 133 
Christmas, 625 
Church 

And Mr. Carnegie's tip, 50, 136 
And interruptors, 201 
And Big Business, 422-424 
And Advertismg, 667-668 
Civil War, The, 12-13, 99 
Civilization 

A kind of rouge, 65 
Fails to express itself, 69 
Stops to think, 77-78 
Trying to do without brains, 88 
. An endless belt, 90 
And millionaires at every hole, 131 
And weapons of defense, 284 
A churn, 515 
Cleveland, 433, 434 
Cold, gray tone, 528-532 
Coles, 245, 252 
Coliseum, 598 
College professors, 439 
Colleges (See "Universities") 
Collier, Robert, 180 
Collier's Weekly, 192, 314, 395 
Cologne Volkszeitung, 685 



Colorado, 141, 647, 649, 672 
Colossus, Mr. and Mrs., 395-397 
Columbus, 595 
Competition 

And higher wages, 93 
And Mr. Ford, 103 
Confession of faith, 11, 453-454, 470. 

483, 701 
Congress, 696, 708, 709 
Conscription, 704 
Constantinople, 275 
Consumer 

And inventor, 92-93 

And Henry Ford's Double Ripper, 

44 
And advertising men, 224 
American and the war, 407-414 
As producer, 411-414 
As employee, 525 
Convicts 

And Henry Ford's Double Ripper, 44 
Henry Ford says "We" with, 132 
Henry Ford disarms with, 272-273 
Cooperation (See "Team-work") 
Copernicus, 595 
Courage 

And gun-thinkers, 12 
And disarmament, 266-267 
Peace and fighting, 347 
Not to take sides, 349, 581-582 
In 1916, 554 

Shaw's and Lowes Dickinson's, 604 
In an advertisement, 665 
Going through the motions of, 698 
Crazed people and nations, xi, xii, 272, 

300-301, 306 
Creator, Accommodating the, 15 
Credit, 566-567, 688 
Crimmals, 271-273 
Crowbars and courage, 12 
Crowd-man, 267 
Crowds 

And newspapers, 220 
And famous men, 307-309 
And great men, 309, 553 
English, German and American, 
627-634 
Croitds, 69, 238, 270, 417 
Crown Prince of Germany, 558 
Culebra Cut, 230, 584 
Curtiss, Glen, 27 
Customers, Shooting, 360-362 



716 



INDEX 



D 



David 

His imprecatory psalms, 9, 21 

His idea of fighting, second-rate, 
22 

And the worm, 660, 661 
Debs, Eugene V., 383 
Declaration of Independence, 377 
Defenses, Two permanent, 706 
Demand and supply, 52 
Democracy 

And machinery, 189 

Living with open doors, 278 
. Of nations, 295-296 

Fate of, 414 

Big business in, 423 

And being an employer, 440-442 

And table-talk, 552-553 
Dentists, American, 215 
Department stores, 186, 389, 446 
Detours and short cuts, 269 
Detroit, 257-258 
Deutsche Tagezeititng, 616 
Diagnosis, two ways, 56-58 
Dickinson, Lowes, 604-605 
Diplomats, 3, 12, 358, 530-532, 538, 

543, 564, 593, 635 
Disarmament 

Makes dreadnoughts look foolish, 
24 

Henry Ford dares, 273 

Makes the enemy afraid, 282-283 

A momentum, 561 

Backed up, 698-699 
Discipline and liberty, 461-462 
Dogs (See "Tomtom") 
Donnelly, Jim, 183 
Double-Rippers, 42-45 
Dreadnoughts 

Do not express as, 21, 26, 27 

Reduced to small boys, 22 

Making them look foolish, 24 

Make idiots sublime, 25 

Shall we let them make us over? 
77-78 

And the industrial machine, 91 

And hospital ships, 146-147 

As monuments to peace, 253- 
254 

Trying to get noticed, 254-255 
Dresden, 695 
Duels, 554, 654 



E 

Edison, 37, 230, 247, 569 

Editors, 229-230 

Education ( See "Universities") 

Education boards, 146-147, 149 

Education machines, 71 

Efficiency 

The end of, 101 

And looking human, 238 

German, 275, 276, 688, 689 

Two gears of, 470-473 

Two tests of, 522 
Electric Light Company of Hartford, 

229 
Elijah, 184, 624-625 
Empire, a back-country idea, 693 
Employers 

Attempt to do without getting at- 
tention, 87-88 

And their industrial machine, 91-94 

And inventors, 92-94 

Mr. Ford's employer-strike, 103 

And Mr. YovA, 112-113 

AMio drop the weapon of being right, 
144-146 

Locked away, 173 

Bringing in religion, 422-424 

Fifty vears ago and to-day, 432-433 

Education of, 438-443 

Must express themselves to four 
groups, 443 

And the cold gray tone, 529 
Enemy, An 

How to wipe out, 22, 24, 260 

Becoming helpless, 273 

Loving him, 462-463, 517-518 

Feeling identified with, 586 
English recruits and American ad- 
vertising, 216 
Englishmen 

Own their own minds, 214 

Feel a little superior, 216 

Germany and suffragettes, 524 

Like individual Americans, 538 

In New York subway, 625 

Travelling by rail, 632 

ECTIOPE 

Caught in a hurry, 5-6 

And Mr. Carnegie, 46 

Panthers, lions and tigers feel akin 

to. 61 
Its theory of human nature, 66-67 



INDEX 



717 



And Its outgrown machines, 76-78 
Challenges American manufacturer. 

407-408, 414 
Hotbed for American ideas, 480 
A Sunday School for America, 557 
And eleven simple nations, 589 
Acting like American crowd, 632-633 
Peace of, 633, 637 
Notices America, 635, 682 
Trying to be like New York, 638 
Agreed on core of America, 639 
Spiritually economical, 654 

Everybody s, 195, 196, 197 

Experts 

In being scared on time, 5, 298 

In human nature, 217, 433, 443, 532 

In perspective, 263-265 

In team work, 266, 423 

In interpreting a nation, 276, 278- 

279, 302, 373 
In murder, 357-360 
In changing men's minds, 410 



Facades, 122-126, 589 

Faces as self-defense, 281-286, 287 

Factories (See also "Industrial Ma- 
chines") 
As mutual attention works, 92 
Go to school to Ford, 120, 158 
And advertising-men, 223-224 
Henry Ford's, 247-248 
And national defense, 292 
Shooting their customers, 360-362 
Mother of, 435 

Fence, The, 182 

Fifth Avenue, 158, 609 

Fifty-cent cigars and thirty-cent re- 
marks, 64 

Finland and the Russian army, 282- 
283, 285, 287 

Fists vs. faces, 284-285 

Flavours, 312-313, 537 

Florence Manufacturing Co., 254 

Focusing a nation, 675-676 

Folk, 383 

Force 

And crazed people, 272 
God's use and the Kaiser's, 293-296 
And the American boy, 367-368 
Physical vs. spiritual, 652 



Ford, Henry 
Is like us, 27 
His double-ripper, 44-45 
iVCikes his money out of peace. 41 
And convicts, 44, 132, 272-273 
And New Testament, 44 
One for every industry, 51 
Makes over his machine, 74-75. 

99-121, 390 
And his peace ship, 96-99 
And Mr. Wilson, 97-98 
A plain mechanic, 98 
Dramatizes peace, 96-97, 99 
And the critics, 99-101, 137 
He is bored, 101-103 
And treating evervbodv alike, 103- 

105 
Making 24.,000 men over, 105-108 
Taking the world into his confi- 
dence, 108-109 
Millionaires, socialists and syndi- 
calists, 109-112 
Speaks for thousands of employers, 

112-113 
Is he advertising his business.^ 113- 

116 
Is he bidding for tlie best workmen.^ 

116-117 
Is he fair to the newspapers.'' 117- 

119 
His peace-school, 51-52, 120, 158, 161 
His We-vision, 121, 132, 247 
And Carnegie, 121 
Needs no fagade, 126 
One's o\\Ti imagination about, 133 
And national defense, 290-292, 478 
Spends ten million dollars on peace, 

451, 456-457 
Puts self-starters into his men, 472 
Ford cars 
Express us, 27 
And Krupp guns, 121 
As news, 114-116, 119 
As national defense, 121 
As a billboard, 245-252 
Three out of four, 257-258 
Foundations 

And Mr. Rockefeller's ideas, 156 
The wrong they do, 156 
A self-criticism, 157 
A model for, 157 
Fourth of Julv, 26 



718 



INDEX 



Franklin, Benjamin, 531 

French, General, 62 

French revolution, Germany's, 479, 

482 
Frick, 45, 651, 671 



G 



Gardner, 259, 260, 261, 263, 267, 
288, 291, 300, 320, 321, 347, 348 
644 
Gary, Judge, 651, 671 
Gases, Asphyxiating, 294, 301, 303, 

349 
Genesis, 616 

George Junior Republic, 296 
Geres, The, 702 
German, The typical, 458 
German- Americans, 611-612 
Germany 

And six million board-bills, 84-86 
And Lissauer's Chant of Hate, 255, 

257, 454-455 
And North German Lloyd ships, 256 
Must use self -discipline, 271 
And the Balkans, 275 
Needs experts in advertising, 276- 

277 
Gets notice, not attention, 297 
Gets human nature wTong, 298, 

495, 498 
Answers the Lusitania note, 329- 

331 
Why she does wrong, 388 
And an American Hollow Home, 397 
Must sort Americans out, 280, 

399-404 
America not so scared about, 417 
Nothing to be afraid of, 421, 652 
And leading the world, 449 
iVid getting on with other nations, 

453 
And America's Confession of Faith 

456 
We-spirit in, 458-460 
Aims her hole too low, 468-469 
Her low-gear efficiency, 471 
And the German socialists, 474- 

478 
And measles, 479 
Her French revolution, 482 



Advertised bv America, 492-4f4, 
499-500, 506 

A civilization of fathers and sons, 
495-498 

Her spy-system, 499-500, 686-688 

And surplus babies, 502-506 

Tries to get England's attention, 
524 

And Brand Whitlock, 536 

"Me and God," 540, 543 

Her drive to Paris, 573 

And the Arabic, 587 

Attacks its own minorities, 590 

A parade of Miinsterbergs, 609-610 

Gives up expressing herself, 655 

America's fear of, 669 

Her illusions about us, 676, 679 

No special brand of human nature, 
680 

Her loss of prestige, 681 

Her hip-pocket peace, 683 

And running America, 688-689 
Gilder, Richard Watson, 212 
Gillette razors, 27 
Goethals, 584 
Goethe, 397, 689 
Gibbon, 397 
Golden rule, 227 
Gompers, Samuel, 383 
Gordon, Rev. George A. 

Scared about human nature, 59- 
62, 592 

Not simple, 593 
Great man. A, 309, 553 
Gravity, Moral force of, xi 
Greenwood, 177 
Gun-Thinkers 

And courage, 12 

Do not express us, 278-279 

Third class minds, 543 

Tliinning each other out, 591 

And patriotism, 694 
Guns, Judging with, 686 



H 



Hague, Peace Palace, The 
A playhouse for peace, 10 
A rescue mission for peace, 16 
A moralizing station for peace, 41 
A little hurried, 53 
An incubator for peace, 54 



INDEX 



719 



A flower-pot for peace, 123 
A wax works of peace, 565 
Hale, Edward Everett, 336 
Harvard 

And new ideas, 164 
Paying Munsterberg six hundred 
thousand a year, 607 
Hate machines and mutual interest 

machines, 4-7, 70-71, 76 
Hearst, W. R., 90, 337, 644 
Hebrew nation, 242 
Hell 

Main road to, 158 
Paved wdth good intentions, 573 
Nations living in, 707 
Helsingfors, 282-283, 285 
Hibben, President, 303-306 
High Street, 43, 512, 702 
Hip-pockets, 246, 248, 283-284, 286, 

569, 571, 678, 682-684 
History from the American point of 

view, 365-366 
Hobson, 292 
Holland, 639 

Hollow Home, An American, 397 
Homer, 222 
Honolulu, 695 
Hookworms and hate, 141, 147, 157, 

227 
Human nature 

And Dr. Gordon, 59-63 
Carnegie should advertise it, 63 
Opposite theories, 64-68, 77-78 
And an anonymous man, 69 
And steel cars, 79-83 
Mr. Ford's engineering problem in, 

105-108 
America will stand up for, 256-257 
Germany gets it wrong, 298, 495,498 
A new trait in, 367-368 
Experts in, 217, 433, 443, 538 
Alike in all countries, 542-544, 559 
And the real war, xiii, 420 
Shaw sees no future for, 603 
No special German brand, 680 
German disbelief in, 687 
Hyenas, 268 



Ideas 

Derrick for. 111 

Yesterday's, 156 

^^hich Foundations need, 156. 159 

Why bother with Mr. Rockefeller's 

162 
And rubber-stamp education, 163 
Government eavesdropj)ing for, 164 
Peddling one's own, 183-184 
Expressing other people's, 191 
Their flavour, 312-313 
And people, 332 
Armed, 378-379 
Literary and dramatized, 411 
Opposite, 583-585 
How to express them, 649 

Illusions 

To be destroyed, 229 

German and American. 675-684 

Imagixation (See also "Attention") 
Of North and South, 13 
Of nations, 13, 28, 456. 652 
Henry Ford touches workmen's, 116 
And the most spiritual secret of mod- 
ern life, 216, 424 
Of soldiers, 363-364 

Immigrant, 612,. 626, 635-636 

India, 689, 695 

Industrl\l Machines 

Beginning to represent us, 71 
And attention, 91 
And world peace, 91-94 

Inspired Millionaires, 92-94, 131-134, 
469 

Inspired Millionaires, 59, 95-96, 236 

International Sociable, 84-85 

Inter ruptors, 184-186 

Inventions (American) and the war, 
216 

I>rVEXTORS 

Of team-work, 52-53 

And industrial peace, 93-94, 131-132 

And employers, 443 

Neutrals, 578 

Germany driving out her important 
ones, 652 
IsAL^H, 242-243 
I. W. W., 467, 487 



I-SiZED men, 403-404, 417, 427, 5m, 

567 
Ichthyosaurus, 167 



Jacob and Esau, 65 
James, Jesse, 34 



720 



INDEX 



James, William, 226 

Japan 

America keeps peace with, 13, 682 
And Collier's Weekly, 396, 397 
Must sort Americans out, 399-404 
Americans not so scared about, 417, 

669 
Nothing to be afraid of, 421 

Jekyll and Hyde, 593 

John and Mary war, 25 

Johnson, Tom L., 129 

Johnsons Bookshop, xii 



K 



Kaiser 

Trying to imitate God, 294 

Forty years ago, 302 

And Karl Marx, 478 

The right not to be his children, 
497-498 

Says "Me and God," ,542 

As a handle, 630 

Gives up on expressing himself, 655 
Kansas, 695 
Kant, 689 
Kipling, 238, 581 
Klaw & Erlanger, 96 
Krupp 

Cannot express us, 27 

Theory of human nature, 66-67 

And Ford cars, 121 

Like the- rest of Germany, 689 



Laboratory method, 366-369, 540 
Labour (See " Workingmen " j 
Labour Unions 

And double rippers, 44, 45 

Attempt to do without getting at- 
tention, 87-88 
Ladies' Home Journal, 180, 443, 668 
Lappers and Gulpers, 320-322, 327-328 
Lawyers, 376-377 
Leadership, science of being believed, 

418 
Leaks, private and international, 458, 

695 
Lees 

A continent of, 348 

Two- 593 



Letter from a benevolent person, 148- 

149 
Lewis, Ham, 308 
Liberal mind, The, 585 
Libraries 

Carnegie's spray of, 129, 135, 139 
Licenses for employers, 440 
Life, 220 
Lincoln, Abraham, 122, 248, 251, 335, 

338, 539, 550 
Lions and lambs, 59 
Lissauer's Chant of Hate, 255, 257, 

403, 454-455, 552, 580 
Literature (See also "Authors") 
(See also "Books") 

And railway safety, 80 

And libraries, 135 

American, 235, 240-241 

As national defense, 264, 292 

Of the future, 264-265 
Living, a slow process, 452 
Lobsters, 464-466 
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 347 
Lord & Thomas, 324, 358-359 
Lorgnettes and female education, 149 
Lost Art of Reading, 533-534 
Lnsitania, 34, 255, 257, 271, 297, 298, 
302, 329, 354, 403, 421, 613, 616, 
685 
Lnsitania notes 

The first, 315-316, 539 

If Roosevelt had written, 324 

The second, 331 

Mr. Wilson writing, 337 

And a Western newspaper, 378 
Luther, Martin, 474 



.1/ 



Macbeth lamp chimney, 208 

Machines 

And the people in charge, 3 

Get ahead of words, 4-7 

The rape of, 25 

For doing without brains, 87-88 

That already have people's atten* 

tion, 90-91, 422-423 
And armoured millionaires, 145 
Must be made a religion, 189 
Making them look human, 238-240 
388-391 



INDEX 



721 



Two stages, 388-391 

And being an employer, 441-442 

Era of, 586 

And the fittest man, 651-652 

Like the tides, 695 
Mackaye, Percy, 580 
McClure's, 195, 196, 197 
McElwain shoes, 246 
Made in America, 405-413 
Made in Germany, 276-277, 413 
Magazines 

An endless belt, 73 

And the territory of attention, 180, 
220 

Authors and ad-authors, 193-196, 
197-201 

Their show windows, 394 

At the outbreak of the war^ 405- 
406 
Mahogany desks vs. rows of corn, 441- 

442 
Mail Order Houses, 186 
Main Street and the back alley 571, 

573, 697 
Man and his wife. A, 593-594 
Manquake, A, 68 
Manufacturers, American, and the 

war, 407-415 
Marconi, 230, 569, 595 
Marx, Karl, 478 
Mary had a little Ford, 108 
Massachusetts legislature closing a 

session, 101 
Material and spiritual, 220, 222, 236- 

241, 242-244, 423-424 
Maxim, Hudson, 342 
" Me and God,"' 540, 542, 543 
Mead, Lucia Ames, 20 
Measles, 479 

Mechanic and artist, 388-389 
Melba, 395, 397 
Mellen, 383 

Metropolitan Insurance Co., 114 
Mexico, 479 

Middle States, The, 500-501 
Midway Plaisance, 193 
Might makes right, 638-639 
Militarism 

Must keep people in holds, 6 

A defeat, 655 
Militarists 

Like arts, 698 



And we-vision, 703 

And world-police, 705-706 
Millionaires (See also "Armoured 
Millionaires") 

Mid- Victorian model, 32 

Bad ones looked after by publicity, 
33 

Beneyolent, a threat at life of na- 
tion, 33-40, 154 

Carnegie's wake of, 45 

The way they make their moaey, 
48 

And socialists, 109-113 

Oyer every hole in ciyilization, 131 

From below, 131-132 

And poetry, 133 

If they would confess, 137 

Their spiritual privations, 155-156 

And switching on the light, 172 

As national defense, 174-175 

Children of machinery, 189 

Theu' hookworm, 227 
Million-dollar ideas, 38 
IVIince pie, eating too much, 72 
Minorities, 590-593 
Ministers (See also "Preachers"), 200 
Mirror 

A million-dollar, 127-128 

As national defense, 574 
Mistakes and guns, 546 
Mohawk Peace Conference, 303, 305 
Moliere, 544 
Money 

The backdoor of every enterprise, 36 

Making it and spending it, 48, 127- 
129, 146-147, 153-157, 160, 165- 
166 

Peace a way of making it, 41, 49, 
51-53 

Thinking with, 110-112, 113 

Fighting with, 144-146 

Singing, 624 

Blood, 707-709 
Monhegan Island, 686 
Monuments 

Our disease of, 122-126 

To Wlo, 253 
Moral blank checks 

Not giving them to Ford, 120-121 
Morgan, Pierpont 

And his collection of the Beautiful. 
154 



722 



INDEX 



Moses, 610 

Mottoes and mustard-plasters, 336- 

337 
Mount Tom, 236, 351, 426, 438, 514, 

614, 615, 637 
Mount Tom, 202-211, 233, 234 
Moving-pictures 
Express us, 27 
Of Carnegie's millions, 128 
And getting the attention of nations, 
85, 259-260, 568-569, 574 
Mummies and millionaires, 155 

MUNSTERBERG, HugO 

His first week, 607 

Harvard pays six hundred thousand 
a year, 607 

Transferring him to Yonkers, 608 

He struts, 609-610 
Murad cigarette, 231 
Murder, a profession, 357-359 
Murder-birds, 303 
Mutual Advertising Agencies, 574 
Mutual interest machines (See "Hate 
machines") 

N 

National Security League, 342, 343 
Nations 

And hate machines, 4-7, 76 

Reduced to one man, 22 

Accommodate Mr. Carnegie, 46 

Attempt to do without getting at- 
tention, 87-88 

Criminal and crazy, 271-272, 300- 
301, 306 

Must be afraid of themselves, 404 

Democracy of, 295-296 
Nearing, Scott, 160 
Neutrality 

America's self-assertion, 402 

Not a mere duty, 573 

And four sides of a statue, 583 

Hard work, 586 
New Testament and Ford, 44 
New York 

And the peace of Europe, 633, 637 

And carrying a revolver, 705 
New York, Chicago and Denver, 594 
New York Evening Post, 327 
New York Sitn, 210, 316, 371 
New York Times, 32, 34 



New York Tribune, 316 
New York, University of, 365 
Newfoundland dog, 626 
Newsboy ^nth fifteen cents, 439 
Newspapers 

And Henry Ford, 117-119 

And Carnegie, 139 

And Bouck White, 179 

Seventy years ago, 194 

As national defense, 292 

And fame, 308 

New York, 317, 371 

Wait for Mr. Wilson, 340 

Reading them, xii, 614-619, 694 

And politicians, 376 

Reaching around the earth, 693 
Niagara Falls, 595 
Nietzsche, 261, 482 
Noah's favourite retort, 64 
Noble-looking characters, 231 
North German Lloyd ships, 256 
N. Y., N. H. & H. R. R., 81-83, 435-436 







Officials, 535, 545 
One Way Street, 315 
Orators, 371 



Packard piano, 246 

Packards, 245 

Panama Canal, 18, 26, 230 

Paradox, 584 

Paris, 594, 695 

Patent medicines, 447 

Patriotism, 290, 294, 295, 374, 405, 
409,511-512,633,694 

Paul, 240 

Peace 

A better way of fighting, 10-14 

A natural energy, 10, 15-20, 89, 125, 

584-586 
A rescue mission for, 16 
A world's Treasure Island, 18 
Mr. Carnegie fails to recognize it, 

41-42 
And double-rippers, 42-45 
Looked at through a telescope, 46- 

48 
As a dove, 47 



INDEX 



/^^.) 



A way of making money, 41, 49, 
51-53, 132, 562-563 

And Mr. Carnegie's tip to the 
church, 50 J 

As Demand, 52-53 

An Engineering Problem in Atten- 
tion, 86, 216 

Must be attended to by machinery, 
89-93 

Industrial and world, 93-94, 173- 
175, 289, 466-469, 560-564 

And Mr. Carnegie's fagade, 123- 
126 

A personal problem, 54-58, 128 

Not Carnegie peace, 139 

And self-expression, 262, 274 

Preachified, 287-288, 381 

America's contribution, 401 

Ten million dollars' worth of, 451 

Not a row of propositions, 547 

A momentum, 561 

A drill for Americans, 561-564 

Presence of mind, 574 

A dynamo, 584-585 

A gyroscope, 599 

War its native element, 599 

Of Europe on Broadway, 633, 637 

Advertising, 669 

America's special opportunity, 701- 
704 

Campaign of, 706 
PEACE-people 

And the imprecatory psalms, 9 

Have not really thought about 
peace, 10 

And their playhouse, 10, 16 

And moral airs, 15-17 

And what peace is not like, 18 

And self-expression, 292 

Must turn the governments out, 
547-548 

No wholesale charges against, 704 
Peace Ship, The, 96-99 
Peace Talk, starts the war, 560, 699 
Peacocks, 124-125 
Pekin, 695 

Penal legislation vs. light, 172 
Pennsylvania locomotive, 321 
Pennsylvania Railroad, 236-241, 381- 

391, 424, 427-431 
Pennsvlvania, University of, 160- 

ler 



Personality 

Cheap investment, 437 

Expressing it, 538-539 
Perspective, 263-265 
Pharaoh, 155 

Philanthropists (See "Benevo- 
lence") 
Philistines, 581 
Planet, This 

A democracy of nations, 295-296, 
705 

Needs another to confide in, 612 

And each man, 449-450 

Staving a hole m, 691, 701 
Plattsburgh, 567 
Plaza 6107, 177-178 
Pleiades, 208 
Plunkett, Mrs, 434-436 
Poets (See also "Authors") 

And railway managers, 240-241 

Soldiers and children, 259-260 

What thev are for, 264-265 

Neutrals,'578, 580-581 

Find something to believe in, 
645 
Pontius Pilate, 343, 344, 345 
Poorhouse, how to help them, 149 
Porcelains and ideas, 156 
Portrait of a nation, 263, 445 
Poverty and benevolence, 150 
Powers, John, 208 
Pragmatists, 366-368 
Preachers, 666-667 
Preaching and fighting, 288 
Preparedness (See also "Self-expres- 
sion") 

The Government's plan, 29-31, 
445 

And armoured millionaires, 143 

Roosevelt's and mine, 287-292 

Point on which it turns, 417 

That goes with American institu- 
tions, 457 

Prepares enemies, 499 

And the ISIiddle States, 500-501 

For peace, 515, 707 

And We-personalitics, 539 

And the President, 641-646 

Our panic of, 678 

Does mean shooting, 682-684 

For being meaner, 696-697 

With vs. against, 702-704 



7:24 



INDEX 



President 

Wants seven thousand officers, 703 

And initiating world-defense, 708 
President of the United States, Being, 

313 
Press Bureau, 634 
Princeton students, Presbyterianism 

and guns, 303, 304 
Printing press, 242 
Program for America, 453 
Property 

Spiritual basis of, 220 

Material and spiritual, 222, 236- 
241, 242-244 
Prosperity during war, 707-708 
Prussian, The, 495, 685 
Psalms, The imprecatory, 9 
Public-be-damned, 387 
Publicity (See also "Advertising"), 

189 
Pumps vs. springs, 472-473 
Puritan inside out, 600 
Pyramids, 155 

Q 

Quakers, 281-282 
Queen Elizabeth, 254 

R 

Railroad presidents, 382, 387 
Railway safety 

A problem in psychology, 79-83 
Raniers, 245 
Raspberries, 312, 537 
Red Cross 

Represents human nature, 67 
Religion 

As a stained-glass tunnel, 133 

And five hundred thousand college 
boys, 163 

And interrupting, 184 

Its inner mainspring, 216-217 
Republican party, 338 
Respectability 

Carnegie's rubber-stamp of, 125 

As an anodyne, 163 
Revolver 

And burglar protection, 16 

Ca)rrying a, 705 
riverside Drive, 371, 705 



Rockefeller, John D. 

Never reads a criticism of himself, 

137 
Should investigate hate, 141-142, 

227 
And the hardships of being benevo- 
lent, 151 
Is one enough? 154-156, 169-170 

171 
When we know him, 166 
An Ichthyosaurus, 167-168 
His failures to understand, 171 
America's "Want Ad," 175 
People in rows to see his hat, 309 
Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 647-649, 

672, 673-675, 677 
Rockefeller Foundation 
The Colorado end, 141-142 
And armoured millionaires, 145 
Needs our ideas, 156, 171 
Its educational value, 162 
Should experiment in souls, 157- 

158 
Rolls-Royce, 251 
Roosevelt, Theodore. 
As a philosopher, 281 
Puzzled by the Quakers, 281 
And preaching and fighting. 288 
Cannot express himself, 289, 352- 

355, 655-657, 662 
And world-defense, 291-292, 300 
The German, French and Russian 

ones, 302 
In Africa, 310 
His Flavour, 312-313 
In a shop window, 314 
Needs a few seers, 318 
Doing team-work with Wilson, 319, 

323-326 
A P. T. Barnum, 325 
National Advertising Motor, 326, 

339, 341 
In San Francisco, 328 
Dropped with a thud, 329-330 
A self-advertiser, 332 
Not naive with himself, 333-335 
A sentimentalist of war, 334, 356, 

362, 366 
If he would look in, 337 
And the Republican party, 338 
Protecting the naticjn from, 347 
Is simple-minded, 350 



INDEX 



v^a 



Protecting one's self from, 354 

And our college students, 365-369 

Doing team-work with Bryan, 373 

At Chicago, 311, 379 

And armed ideas, 378-380 

And treaties, 454 

Tries to express America, 538 

His plan, 571, 644 

And two sides of an idea, 583 

Sends fleet around world, 635 

Too meek, 658-662 

Not spiritually robust, 665 

A superficial observer, 669 

Owes his career to advertising, 671 

Advertising a fear of his, 677 

Fifty years hence, 680 

And Bryan's treaties, 377 

Rosebery, Lord, 55^2 

Rosebushes and self-defense, 269-270 



S 



Safety first, 697, 700 

Salesman, 185, 225 

Salvation Army, 661 

Samson, 97 

San Francisco, 328 

San Francisco Earthquake, 67-68 

Saturday Evening Post, 180, 228, 325, 

666 
Saying and doing, 669-670 
Scared people 

Moving them off, 420, 591-592 

Turning them out, 548 

And Mr. Wilson, 641-644 

Moving them to middle of conti- 
nent, 653 

A census of, 659 

Same in all generations, 680 
School children, German and Ameri- 
can, 461 
Schumann, 397 
Scliurz, Carl, 474 
Schwab, 45 

Scraps of paper, 377, 454, 455 
Scratch a gentleman, 64-68 
Screw, Turning a, 520-521, 673-676 
Searchlights. 289 
Self-advertising, 332-333 
SELF-expressiou 

The problem of peace, 262 



And self-defense, 270-274, 278. 456 
650 

Every man in his own way, 290-292 
323, 328, 346 

The doom of war, 355 

And mutual self-expression, 390 

In (iermany, 496 

Secret of power, 649 

Campaign of, 706 
Self-possession, 300-301, 306 
Self-starters, 472 

Sensation, rules for making one, 119 
Sentimentalists, 334, 356-357, 370 
Sermon on the Mount, 566 
Sewers and Poland water, 153-154 
Shakespeare, 208, 209, 238, 441, 544 
Shaw, George Bernard 

A man without a country, 596-597 

His endowment for seeing truth, 
597, 602 

His frivolity, 598 

Not a peaceful man, 599, 600 

Not an artist, 600-601 

The Devil envies, 601-602 

His function, 602-603 

And Lowes Dickinson, 604-605 
Sheep and goat view of life, 73 
Sheffield, 695 
Show windows 

For millionaires, 172 

For the nation, 288 

In the magazines, 394 
Shubert, 96 
Silk hats, 123, 124, 162 
Sinclair, Upton, 487 
Sing Sing, 271 
Sixs 

Machine-made, 72-74 
Skeletons, of men and nations, 538 
Skinning a boy alive, 446 
Smile, The national, 569 
Smith College Vesper Service, 59-60 
Smith, John Brown, 382-384 
Socialism 

A substitute for, 160 

And Bouck White, 179-180 
Socialists 

Have temporary jobs, 109 

And thinking with money, 110-112, 
113 

And our universities, 160-161 

Germany's, 474-478 



\ 



726 



INDEX 



Soldiers (See also "Gun-thinkers"') 
One cannot feel superior to, 8 
Have no courage about themselves, 

12 
And Sunday School Children, 259- 

260 
Cannot express people, 265-268, 

657 
Tenth-rate men to-day, 266 
And being human, 278-279 
Save an old woman's life, 363-364 
Do not see dramatically, 381 

Souls and bodies, 161, 168 

Souls, News about, 242-249, 667, 668 

Spain, 635, 640 

Specialists (See "Experts") 

Spectators, The war of, xiii 

Spiritual real estate, 180, 220, 222, 
371 

Springfield, xii, 622, 623, 624 

Springfield Republican, 611, 612 

Spy system, German, 499-500, 686, 
688 

Stand-patter-patter, 311 

Standard emotions, 374-376 

Standard Oil Company, 92, 186, 292 

Standards, 375 

Statesman, A, 338 

Steel cars, 79-83 

Steel Trust, 292, 422, 426-427, 430- 
431, 651 

Stockholders 

Mechanical-minded, 410 
A private book for, 426-427 

Streets have the last word, 60 

Strike 

Mr. Ford's employer-strike, 103 
A standing advertisement for war, 

173-174 
\Miy so many fail, 185 

Strut, The German, 609-610 

Style, 198, 655 

Success 

The man who gets most, 417-418 
A spiritual secret, 423 
Main item of, 436-437 

Suffragettes, 480, 486-487, 524 

Sunday, Billy, 537 

Sunday School Scholars, 259-260, 286 

Superstitions and quarrels, 513-515 

Survival of fittest to serve, 52-53 

Suspender button, 434-435 



Suspicion bills, 392, 399 

Switzerland, 640 

Syndicalists (See "Socialists") 



TABLE-talk and democracv, 552-553 

Taft, William H. 

And Mr. Roosevelt, 310 

And the stand-patter-patter, 311 

Tries to express America, 538 

Tariff, 574 

Teacups vs. dollars, 166 

TEAM-work 

An American instinct, 27, 638 

Peace is, 52-53 

And twelve million troops, 85 

And the Rockefeller Foundation, 142 

In not listening, 178 

Making people believe in it, 231-232 

In a machine-age, 266, 276, 423, 

444, 651 
Between Wilson and Roosevelt, 319 
Between Roosevelt and Bryan, 373 
In Germanv, 458-460 
Two gears of, 470-473 
Between men and women, 488-491 
America must arrange, 558-559 
A national drill in, 562-564 

Tears 

The right place to shed, 403 
Our grandchildren's, 543 

Technique 
Mr. Ford's, 75 
The advertising man's, 223 
Of Women's Peace Party, 664 
Yearning vs., 46, 75, 370-372 

Telephones and the cold gray tone, 
527-528 

Thackeray, 262 

Third Person, The, 57 / 

Three Books War, 261 

Titanic, 637 

Tolstoi, 544 

Tomtom, 62, 511-512 

Tonsorial artists, 359 

Tooth-brush, Expressing a, 202-210, 
226, 233-235, 237 

Trading with one hand, 402-403 

Treaties, 372-373, 376-377, 448, 454, 
455-456 

Tree, Sir Herbert, 96 



INDEX 



7^/ 



Treitschke, 261 

Trinity, 584 

Trombone-player, 97 

True, the beautiful and the good, 153, 

379, 653 
Trusts 

And double-rippers, 44, 45 

A great discovery, 167-168 

Being impersonal, 388 

Saying "We," 524-525 
Truth, 583 
Turkey, 275 

Turnips, corn and potatoes, 557-558 
Twentieth Century, 70, 90, 222, 240, 

680 
Twilight of the arts, 206 
Typewriters and attention bills, 218- 
219 



U 



Umpire vs. Empire, 559 
Uncle Sam 

And Main Street, 571 

And the automobile, 572 
Understanding Army, 507, 644, 654 
United States of Europe, 637 
Universities 

And millionaires, 34-40, 136, 159- 
164 

Laugh at Mr. Carnegie, 48 

And Henry Ford, 120 

And Mr. Carnegie's fagades, 125 

Of Europe^ 163-164 

And military training, 267, 303-305, 
342, 344, 365-369 

And Mr. MUnsterberg, 607 
Up and Down, 517-518 



Vail, Theodore N., 13, 292, 441 

Van Allen, Rev. Dr. W. H., 581 

Vanderbilt, 387 

Villard, Oswald, 291 

Virtue-mongers. 667 

Vision 

Mr. Carnegie should invest in, 50 
Mr. Ford has We-vision, 121, 132 

Vitus, St., 580 

Von Tirpitz, 331 



W 



Wages 

Making money by raising them, 53 

And competition, 93 

And armoured millionaires, 146 

The consumer's interest, 525 
Wagner, 544 
Walker, 308 
Wall Street, 100, 247 
Walsh, 171 

Walz, Professor, 611, 612 
War 

History's last look, 6 

A confession of failure, 12 

If Carnegie would advertise human 
nature, 63 

Its bottom cause, 71 

The collapse of advertising, 257 

And a habit of Mr. Roosevelt's, 352 

The doom of, 355 

A water-colour word, 356-357, 362 

The real war, xiii, 420 

Lopsided imagination, 447-448 

Ends by seeing, 455 

Stops trying, 540 

An agreement not to learn, 541 

A momentum, 561 
War, The 

People's theories of, 3 

A breakdowTi of European lan- 
guages, 4-7 

A hurry, 5 

Two ways of diagnosing, 56-58 

A war against machines, 76 

What the world is really fighting, 
496-498 

A problem in human nature, xiii, 
498 

The best issue, 541 

Its fundamental news, 548 

Whole cause of, 686 
Washington talks ^\\\h. Paris, 695 
Washington, Booker, 13 
Washington, George, 248 
Watson, William, 581 
"We" 

With convicts, 132 

With millionaires, 172 

As a national habit, 175, 402 

In Henry Ford's factory, 247- 
248 

First condition of success, 390. 444 



728 



INDEX 



The men who will not say it, 399- 
402 

In Germany, 459-460 

In the life of a man, 520 
Webster, Noah, 241 
Wendell, Barrett, 197 
West Point and the people, 30 
Westminster Abbey, 185 
White, Bouck, 179-180 
Whistle, An idiot, 254 
White mice (See "Cancer") 
White papers and blue papers, 312 
Whitlock, Brand, 536-537 
Whitman, Walt, 205, 348, 645 
Who's Who, 307 
Widow who tried to make her child 

live forever, 155 
Widows and orphans and speculators, 

447 
Williamsburg, 598 
Wills, 376 

Wilson, Woodrow (See also "Presi- 
dent") 

Asks Carnegie, 39 

As a looking-glass, 310 

His flavour, 312-313 

Portrait of, 314 

Over-legal-minded, 316-317 

His own seer, 317-318, 337-338 

Doing team-work with Roosevelt, 
319, 323-326, 373 

As Light, 326 

Makes a magnificent guess, 329-331 

Gets the President right first, 334 

Looks in, 337 

His reserves, 340-341 

Understands Bryan, 372 
. "Too proud to fight," 374-375 

And increased armament, 508-510, 
641-646 

Expressing America, 539 

His plan, 571 

Trying to help him, 576 

And the scared people, 641-644 

Mr. Roosevelt's President, 644 

And the Women's Peace Party, 663- 
664 

Roosevelt says what is the matter 
with, 669 
Wireless, 3 
Witherell, Mr., 702 



Woman, New, 435-436, 486-487 

Women 

German and American, 481-487 
German and French, 488-491, 496 

Women's Peace Party, 663-664, 665 

Wood, A. Wise, 30, 702 

W^ood, Gen. Leonard, 31 

Word-pickers (See "Advertising 
men") 

W^ordsworth, 208 

Workaday things, 207-209 

WORKINGMEN 

And Henry Ford's Double-Ripper, 

44-45 
Henry Ford gets attention of his, 

74-75 
And inventors, 93-94 
And Ford's " indiscriminateness," 

103-105 
Mr. Ford pays them in advance, 

105 
Mr. Ford tries to make them over, 

105-108 
Mr. Ford's not picked men, 116 
And Mr. Ford's peace-school, 120 
Locked away, 173 
Their hookworm, 227 
Mr. Ford's best advertisement, 

248-249 
As consumers, 411-414 
And lobster-pots, 466-469 
And the cold gray tone, 529 
And John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 647- 

649, 673-675 
World police force, 291-292, 306, 398, 

695, 700-709 
Wright, Wilbur, 27, 230, 247 



Yale 

And new ideas, 164 

And book-agents, 182-183, 185 
Yearning vs. technique, 46, 75, 370- 

372 
Yonkers, 606, 608 



Zeppelins, 3 



THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 



